Scan your brain with Nokia N900 [video]

Oh, why did I sell my Nokia N900 smartphone last year? The N900 can now perform real-time brain scans right in the comfort of my home -- or yours. Seriously, it doesn't get much more geek than this. Watch the video, and you'll see.

I loved the N900. It truly was a pocket computer and shows just how much innovation Nokia can produce -- or did before CEO Stephen Elop killed off what he called the "burning platform". A team from Technical University of Denmark has created what they call the Smartphone Brain Scanner, built around the N900 and wireless 14-channel EEG headset. Arkadiusz Stopczynski, Carsten Stahlhut, Michael Kai Petersen, Jakob Eg Larsen and Lars Kai Hansen developed the scanner, which they promote with clever tagline: "Holding your brain in the palm of your hand".

Larsen posted the above video on September 8, but it's getting play today because of a story in New Scientist.

"The smartphone provides a touch-based interface with real-time brain state decoding and 3D reconstruction", he explains. "Our system provides a fully portable EEG based real-time functional brain scanner including stimulus delivery, data acquisition, logging, brain state decoding and 3D activity visualization. The software is realized in Qt".

Say, isn't the Qt development framework yet something else Elop would like to throw out (it will continue in open-source afterlife, surely).

"The headset transmits the EEG data to a receiver module connected to a Nokia N900 phone", Larsen continues. "The binary data is decrypted directly on the phone, filtered and passed to the source reconstruction module that outputs the colors of model vertices for the visualization".

Seriously this is so cool and is proof point for Americans obsessed with Apple's iOS and iPhone, there's cool innovations elsewhere -- and in this case with lots of help from open-source software and Volvo-like hardware.