---
title: "3D printed helmet enables world’s first wearable brain scanner"
url: https://www.voxelmatters.com/3d-printed-helmet-enables-worlds-first-wearable-brain-scanner/
date: 2026-08-04
modified: 2026-08-04
lang: en
author: "Davide Sher"
description: "A wearable brain scanner developed by University College London and the University of Nottingham relies on a custom 3D printed helmet to hold an array of quantum sensors close to..."
categories:
  - "Medical Research"
  - "Research & Education"
tags:
  - "future"
image: https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Nueroscience-liberty-640x427.jpg
word_count: 916
---

# 3D printed helmet enables world’s first wearable brain scanner

A wearable brain scanner developed by University College London and the University of Nottingham relies on a custom 3D printed helmet to hold an array of quantum sensors close to the scalp, letting patients move naturally during a scan. The system, known as optically pumped magnetometer magnetoencephalography, or OPM-MEG, is what its developers describe as the world's first portable brain scanner.

![](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Nueroscience-gareth-scaled.jpg)Gareth Barnes, Head of Magnetoencephalography at University College London, helped lead the development of OPM-MEG, the world's first wearable brain scanner. Credit: Wellcome. License: Attribution CC BY.

"What we're doing here is a world first," said Gareth Barnes, head of magnetoencephalography at UCL. "It's a brain scanner you can wear. And that's very different from a brain scan that's typically a tube you get jammed into. It has changed the way we think about the brain and how the brain works, and it's allowed us to scan the brain in its natural environment. It's a big breakthrough for neuroscience."

Barnes and Matt Brookes, head of physics at the University of Nottingham, have spent the past decade developing OPM-MEG as an alternative to invasive intracranial electroencephalograms and to conventional MEG, which requires patients to stay still inside a fixed scanner. Brookes described that equipment as "a very big one-size-fits-all thermos flask into which everybody's head has to fit," noting that its magnetic field detectors must run at minus 269 degrees Celsius, kept behind a vacuum inside a rigid shell that holds them a relatively long way from the head. Any head movement blurs the resulting magnetic field, and because children's heads sit proportionally farther from the fixed sensors, sensitivity drops further for younger patients who also struggle to stay still through a scan.

![](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Nueroscience-helment-scaled.jpg)The custom 3D-printed OPM-MEG helmet holds quantum sensors close to the head, enabling highly detailed measurements of brain activity without requiring people to remain still. Credit: Wellcome. License: Attribution CC BY

The sensors behind OPM-MEG originated in research aimed at making atomic clocks smaller and cheaper in the early 2000s, when US scientists found the same components could measure the brain's small magnetic fields without cryogenic cooling. "My team did some simulations on what might be possible, and the results were so exciting we went to London and took the results to Gareth," Brookes said. "He was very excited too, and that's how we got started." Because the resulting sensors are no larger than a thumbnail, they can sit inside a lightweight, custom 3D printed helmet whose lattice structure positions dozens of them close to the scalp. The helmet can be scaled to fit babies, children, and adults individually, and each sensor wires into a backpack worn by the patient inside a magnetically shielded room, leaving them free to move, stand, or walk during the scan.

![](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Neuro-brain-scan-3078x1731-1.jpg)Development was funded by Wellcome, which awarded Barnes and Brookes a five-year collaborative grant in 2016 after the pair applied for funding armed with a toy building block to show the size of the sensor they were aiming for. "That longevity of funding enabled us to get from an initial prototype to where we are now, which is something that can actually be used routinely for neuroscientific discovery," Barnes said.

Wellcome also supported mathematical modeling and experimental design work at the UCL Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, early validation of the prototype, and the UK's first dedicated pediatric OPM-MEG clinic at the epilepsy charity Young Epilepsy, where the scanner is already being used, in collaboration with Great Ormond Street Hospital, to map the brains of children facing complex epilepsy surgery.

The technology was developed initially for children with epilepsy, a group for whom conventional scanning is especially limited. "Children not only have small heads, but they also find it difficult to stay still within a conventional scanner," Barnes said. As a result, children are often scanned only when they are about 18, which means they have surgery only as adults, by which time their education is finished. Treating epilepsy earlier, or operating earlier, would be a big advantage to these children, and that's what this technology might allow."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNT8obltdUo

Rachel, whose daughter Liberty had 30 seizures a day by age seven and underwent an intracranial EEG that involved ten days in the hospital with wires implanted directly in her brain, said a faster diagnostic process would make a real difference: "I think it will offer enormous hope because it's such a slow process otherwise: doing all the diagnostic tests, waiting for results, the results aren't clear, so it's back to the drawing board. It's a really long process. Anything that can speed that up will be amazing."

Researchers are also examining OPM-MEG's potential for conditions including Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, dementia, and autism, along with applications in sports, such as scanning athletes for head injuries on the field, and in military settings for traumatic brain injury. Brookes and Barnes are working to extend the technology to map spinal cord activity to support research into neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis that affect both the brain and the spinal cord. The scanner remains in research use while awaiting medical device approval, with its developers hoping for clinical approval in 2027. "If I were to go back ten years and somebody could show me what we're doing now, I'd think it would look like science fiction," Brookes said. "The idea that we can scan people while they're standing up, walking around, or dancing—yeah, it would have seemed like something from Star Trek."