Last Updated on January 5, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org
Some years ago we had a discussion with a Neurospec salesman. Neurospec sells EEG devices in Switzerland:
The salesman from Neurospec said he is in the business for EEG devices in Switzerland if we remember correctly for over 20 years, and he never heard of Greentek EEG caps. We did hardly find any papers who use these caps either.
We sah that the Greentek Gelfree EEG cap migrated from the YouTube channel of Krisztián Hofstädter:
https://www.youtube.com/@krishofstadter/videos
to the YouTube channel of mBrain Train after we became interested in the Greentek Gelfree S3 cap. We have some doubts about this cap as far as reliability is concerned. We mentioned those previously in our journal. We did not find a demo which could convince us of the proper functioning of the cap. But we have now found two papers which use the cap which we haven’t studied yet:
On Krisztián Hofstädter there are hardly any YouTube videos left after we became interested in those. Are these controlled by a marketing trust and a business software who wanted us to migrated from OpenBCI to mBrainTrain? We did not do this.
And what about Greentek Sensors and mBrainTrain? Greentek sensors advertises with a beautiful model for EEG caps:
https://www.greenteksensor.com/products/eeg-caps/
But the same model advertises also for mBrainTrain:
Did the model fly from China to Serbia to record a YouTube video? This is hard to believe. So are these companies somehow linked to each other, OpenBCI, mBrainTrain and Greentek sensors?
Another model for EEG caps is Benny Deng, former sales man of Greentek sensors:
We had a short conversation with Benny Deng some years ago. He seemed to have a flexible position at Greentek sensors, selling EEG products but also products from other companies. So it was not a full-time job to sell EEG devices as far as we know. Benny Deng was EEG cap model and sales man, as shown in this video showing Benny Deng wearing a Greentek EEG cap:
Is the job which is offered by mBrainTrain on their website:
similar flexible as the one from Benny Deng, sales man, part-time and EEG cap model?
Our hypothesis is that there is a marketing trust for EEG devices between OpenBCI, mBrainTrain, Greentek sensors and eventually others such as g.tec medical, eventually caused by marketing software who controls the prices for EEG devices. A market leader for EEG devices is Texas Instruments. Is Texas Instruments the «big player» who controls many of these EEG devices?
We suppose that g.tec medical uses similar marketing software which controls the prizes from the cheapest device Unicorn Black for 1 000 USD to the most expensive device, the multi-purpose which costs 50 000 USD:
This reminds of the OpenBCI demos which start for instance for the OpenBCI Cyton which is sold by www.OpenBCI.com for 1 000 USD to the OpenBCI Galea which costs 25 000 USD.
This seem to be a simple business model.
- OpenBCI and Unicorn Black cost the same. for 1 000 USD with the same EEG channel number.
- OpenBCI Galea with 16 channels costs 25 000 USD
- a g.tec medical multi-purpose device with 32 channels 50 000 USD.
Is this not a very simple business model with very high prices?
Devices which seem not to be part of this trust are OpenBCI modules sold on eBay and Aliexpress. These are sold for lower prices than the ones sold from www.OpenBCI.com. But we have some evidence that EEG products sold on eBay and Aliexpress are the target of business scientists who do stock market speculations with those to increase prices as soon as they receive positive feedback. So it is better not to publish links to these products with positive feedbacks.
Marketing trusts are forbidden in Switzerland