Review of Wiretap Headphones

The Wiretap headphones are an innovative solution to possibly our society's most prevalent problem: emotional well being. The stigma surrounding taking care of one's emotional health prevents people, especially youth, from seeking the attention and care that they need. With the Wiretap headphones, people can handle their stress and anxiety with a low key, unobtrusive product. The technology behind the Wiretap headphones is sound, and while it may not be commercially feasible yet, the technology is not far away in its availability. While there are some major concerns with the Wiretap headphones, the possibilities with Wiretap are exciting.

Wiretap was targeted towards youth struggling with depression, citing suicide rates as the main concern from the developers. An obvious contributor towards adolescent suicide is that adolescents choose not to share their feelings of stress/anxiety or don't know how to express those feelings to other people. While Wiretap does not help adolescents learn those communication skills, it does make them aware of those feelings. From a personal standpoint, learning what certain emotions feel like is an important part of adolescence, as is how we react to those feelings, such as isolating ourselves when feeling depressed. Even without the feature of alerting an emergency contact, Wiretap is useful as an awareness feature.

Contacting an emergency contact in the event that someone ignores the feeling notifications can also teach adolescents how to be accountable for their own feelings. If they don't want to have someone contacted, they can learn how to manage their own feelings, but there's also no shame in those messages being sent to someone that cares. The messaging portion of the app keeps Wiretap from being a useless product. Without it, adolescents can just dismiss the Wiretap readings like they would dismiss their own feelings.

The main concern with Wiretap is that they have to be worn at all times. This presents both a problem in their functionality and in the potential stigma they provide. Having to wear these headphones all the time is not realistic, and living inside the headphones would make it hard for people to actually overcome their stress and anxiety. The stigma that these headphones would bring would also be majorly detrimental for adolescents. It may give bullies an easy target, which is the last thing adolescents struggling with anxiety and depression need.

While the idea behind Wiretap has merit, the actual implementation of it as headphones seems lacking. Is it a realistic idea? Absolutely. Is it the most effective solution for the problem? I don't particularly think so.