Testing the new Flowtime device

I purchased a Flowtime device to better understand this company's approach to creating consumer devices to help enter flow states. Flow, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. This device, as advertised by the company, "FLOWTIME  makes meditation intangible into tangible. Brainwave data, heart rate, breath coherence, attention, relaxation, etc." and "Learn meditation guided by leading teachers, a calmer, less stressed, and healthier life is within reach." It seems they are addressing two different markets in one device - the ability to measure bio and EEG information, and an app that can deliver guided meditation. So, not quite real-time neurofeedback like the Muse devices, but has potential to become a real-time neurofeedback device. The biologic/neurologic metrics the device captures are: 

1. Heart rate
2. Heart rate volatility
3. Blood pressure
4. Raw EEG measurements from two prefrontal sensor

From these data, the app then calculates the following: 

1. Attention
2. Relaxation
3. Breath Coherence (not sure exactly how this is measured)
4. Breakdown of brain waves into gamma, beta, alpha, theta, and delta

I decided to complete a very simple test to better understand the capabilities of the Flowtime device. I would record my brain states in three different ten minute sessions: 

1. Regular activity - Browsing the web, reading documents, and paying bills (10 min)
2. Meditation - focus on the breath as the object of meditation (10 min)
3. Entrainment - using the Kasina Mindplace to enter a meditative state (10 min)

I separated each session by about 10 minutes to reset my brain state and then test again. The goal of this test is to understand the capabilities of the device and understand its potential in measuring brain states accurately. 

Regular Activity - 10 min.
The following graph shows the brainwave states for the 10 minutes of just doing normal activity. As you can see, the graph is all over the place as I switch my focus between tasks, am reading information, and making simple decisions: ​

Meditation - 10 min.
Here is the activity for 10 minutes of focusing on the breath as the object of meditation. You can see more correlation between alpha and theta and a ramp-down of overall brain activity: ​

Entrainment - Kasina Mindplace (10 min.)
I used the built-in program called "Forest" from the Kasina Mindplace device to test whether or not brain entrainment would cause a measurable difference in brain states from the Flowtime device. Here the brain waves are tightly correlated. There is a blip at the end which I believe is when I took the goggles off to see how much time I had left (I couldn't tell because the Flowtime app's notification could not overpower the light and sound device's binaural beats). Here are the results of the 10 minute exercise: 

Analysis of the data
I created a spreadsheet to compare some of the primary bio and neuro metrics across the three sessions. This uncovered one of the limitations of the Flowtime device - it doesn't make it easy to extract the raw data into a CSV format for analysis, I had to manually create the spreadsheet. It would be nice to be able to easily export the data for more detailed analysis. 

Here is that sheet: 

The first thing I noticed after creating this sheet is that there is very little difference between the times spent in the measured brainwave bands. It looks statistically insignificant. Other measurements show significant differences including: 

1. Coherence time - meditation session showed the highest coherence time, significantly higher than the other two sessions. 
2. Attention - Normal activity seemed to create the highest attention value. 
3. Relaxation - Meditation created the highest relaxation value. 
4. Blood pressure - Entrainment created the lowest pressure value. 

Conclusion
There is a lot of potential with this device and these early tests show that the device is detecting differences in brain states based on the activity performed. The application is easy to use, albeit somewhat cluttered in the user experience with help articles. The application could become a more serious device for clinical research if it had more advanced export capabilities. It is hard to find detailed data on how the device works including sensitivity, sampling rate, and how the calculated metrics are calculated.