An investigation reveals how the Headband Focuscalm collects neural information of western athletes such as Sinner or Leclerc through devices financed by Military Bodies of Beijing

In practice, these athletes use the Focuscalm Bandana to concentrate and relax that the EEGs, and the owner of the company that produces the bandana is Chinese. The latter is required to provide the data of its customers (like the best western athletes, such as Sinner or Leclerc) to the Chinese government, which would use them for their soldiers or for the development of robots.

The salient points of the article:

The brain waves of the Italian tennis player Jannik Sinner may have ended up on Chinese databases. This is supported by a duration of months made by Hunterbrook, an American investigative header specialized in independent investigations

The investigation, conducted together with the journalist Pablo Torre, discovered that Brainco receives funding for tens of millions of dollars from China Electronics Corporation (CEC), a state military military contractor subjected to American penalties for links with the popular army of liberation, and that Chinese laws on national security obliged all companies in the area to share any fact with the government on request, without the possibility of refusalmaking it accessible to Beijing’s intelligence, the neural information of the blue champion and all the other western athletes who use the device.

While the company claims that all EEG data are automatically deleted at the end of each session, The patents deposited in 2020 describe a system that provides for the direct transmission of information between the band and cloud servers for processing. The developer documentation confirms that the algorithms process the data also in the cloud, contradicting the reassurances provided after the investigation.

The privacy policy was strategically modified on September 7, 2025, three days after Brainco’s response to investigators. The previous version, recoverable through web archives, specified that devices collect personal data such as level of attention, geographical position, EEG raw data (complete recordings of brain activity), gender and time to monitor and improve services. The new version claims that only calculated scores are sent to the servers and that these cannot be reconstructed the original signals, statements that contrast with the company’s technical documentation.

But what arouses greater concern, according to the American newspaper, is that Brainco has established partnership with the Chinese military apparatus. In fact, the company collaborates with Unitree Robotics, Chinese manufacturer of humanoid and quadruped robots used for military applications, and with at least three universities involved in the defense research.