Halo Sport

» see haloneuro.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The proposition was that you could train better by running electricity through your head first. Halo Sport looked like a pair of chunky headphones, and the headband held rows of wet foam spikes that sat against your scalp above the motor cortex. You wore it for twenty minutes before practice while it passed about two milliamps through you, then took it off and did your session. The company called this neuropriming, and the claim was that the stimulated brain would absorb repetitive physical training faster than it otherwise would.

Halo Neuro was incorporated in Delaware in 2013 by Daniel Chao and Brett Wingeier, who had both come out of NeuroPace, a company that makes implanted neurostimulators for epilepsy. These were people with real credentials in the field, which matters to how the story reads. They raised somewhere around twenty-eight to thirty million dollars across two rounds led by Lux Capital and then TPG, with Andreessen Horowitz among the names behind them.

It went on general sale on 16 November 2016 at $699, discounted off a $749 list. Before that it had spent most of a year with exactly the customers you would pick for this, among them the United States Ski and Snowboard Association and three Major League Baseball clubs. Michael Johnson's performance center had it, and so did sprinters and swimmers preparing for Rio. Five NFL players put their names to it at launch. A second-generation Halo Sport arrived in January 2019 at $399, with Bluetooth instead of a cable and a one-piece removable primer strip.

~ the case file ~

~ what the evidence actually said ~

Halo's own homepage carried numbers. A 15% performance improvement and results 45% faster, under a line claiming that thousands of peer-reviewed papers prove that neuropriming works. Transcranial direct-current stimulation is a real and heavily studied technique, so that last sentence is doing a lot of quiet work, folding a large literature about the method into an endorsement of one product.

The criticism was on the record early and came from inside the field. In IEEE Spectrum in August 2016, Vincent Walsh of UCL said he did not think people were reporting all the experiments that did not work, and predicted the hype would drive some short-term sales and then leave a lot of sports institutes with unused machines in their storerooms. Marom Bikson, himself a tDCS researcher, pointed out there is a large gap between finger dexterity and athletic performance. The published work on the device specifically went both ways: one peer-reviewed study found it improved repeated sprint cycling, another found it did nothing for a three-minute high-intensity cycling test.

Worth being precise about the regulatory position, because it is often stated wrongly. Halo Sport was never cleared or approved by the FDA and never needed to be, because it was sold as a general wellness product for healthy adults rather than as a medical device. The company hoped to pursue clearance for stroke rehabilitation and never got there. No FDA or FTC enforcement action against it has been reported.

~ whose product this was ~

I sit a long way outside the market for this one, and geography is the smaller half of it. Seven hundred and forty-nine dollars of brain stimulation sold to people whose job is their body has a very specific buyer, and that buyer is a professional athlete or somebody training like one. Performance enhancement bought at retail by individuals is an American consumer habit that has never had much purchase here. I read about it in 2016 as a thing happening to other people's training schedules.

~ the six-month fuse ~

The pandemic closed the gyms and the teams, which is the explanation the trade press settled on afterward. On 5 February 2021 Flow Neuroscience, a Swedish company making a tDCS headset for depression, announced it had bought Halo's technology and research along with twenty-eight patents. Terms were not disclosed. Wingeier called Flow the best possible successor and stayed on as an adviser.

The farewell went up on Halo's own homepage, and it carries no date anywhere on it, which is why this grave is filed to the acquisition instead. It said the product line would be discontinued for customer purchase and the service would end, and then it said something unusually decent: the app and the products already sold would keep running. Owners were not bricked. The FAQ confirmed it twice over, promising the device would still work and the companion app would stay available.

The catch is in the same support page, a few answers down. The wet foam primer band is a consumable and lasts about six months with regular use, and the answer to whether you could buy more was that there would be no further production of any Halo customer product, ever. So nothing was switched off and nothing needed to be. Every surviving headset was running on a timer set by a strip of foam, and the official advice for when contact got bad was to soak it longer or wet your hair.

~ the name came back ~

Flow did not retire the brand. haloneuroscience.com is live today, selling a tDCS headset for mood and sleep and focus, describing Flow as the parent company of Halo, with a current iPhone app and replacement pads available through it. None of that is Halo Sport. The athletic product, the spiky headband and the twenty-minute pre-practice session are gone, and what carries the name now is a consumer mental-health device from the company that bought the patents.

Daniel Chao had already moved on before the sale closed, and was running System1 Biosciences, a neurotherapeutics company working on brain organoids, by August 2020. The original haloneuro.com kept serving the undated goodbye until the hosting lapsed sometime between August 2023 and January 2024, after which it showed a DreamHost placeholder saying the owner had not yet uploaded a website. Since late 2024 it has redirected to a Twitter profile.

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