Research in tracking heart rate and respiration using radio waves has been happening for decades. Technology has progressed to the point where modern devices can detect a heartbeat through 30 feet of rubble or 20 feet of solid concrete: http://www.dhs.gov/detecting-h... . Chapter 2 of Jonathan S Burnham's 2009 MIT master's thesis seems to have a nice historical overview: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/6... . There probably are novel things about the MIT technology mentioned in the original post (e.g. lower power RF or better separation of individuals), but there is nothing new about tracking heart rate and respiratory rate through walls.

While I don't have experience with neuro-feedback, I do have some experience building and using an EEG.

As the parent says, an EEG signal is complicated, noisy, and difficult to interpret. Many of the wild promises are just that; wild promises used to hype business plans. To get an idea of what's currently possible with state of the art research for implanted electrodes (which provide a much better signal than a surface EEG), the following nature video on research at Brown may help:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ogBX18maUiM .

If you are still interested, it is very possible to play with EEG signals at home. The OpenEEG project is one place to start. If you are interested in designing your own hardware, the ADS1299 provides much of the functionality in a single chip (and allows you to do much more of the filtering in software where you can play more tricks). Noise is a major issue. You'll want good electrodes (sintered silver-silver chloride are best) and some form of electrode gel. You'll also want to look into signal analysis techniques; this in an active area of research for EEGs. The book "Brain-Computer Interfaces: Principles and Practice" edited by Wolpaw and Wolpaw (ISBN 978-0195388855) provides a good overview.

A small group of us are currently working on an open-hardware EEG-controlled mouse that you can build at home. It's still at an early stage, but we have managed to move a cursor on screen to a series of targets (and show via bootstrapping that we're doing much better than chance). The designs for the board and software prototypes can be found here: https://github.com/ericherman/eeg-mouse . If you want to be notified when we have something a little less prototype-like, send one of us an email and we'll start a list. If you want a better description of where we're at, create an issue on github.

You *can* play with this at home - either with your own software/hardware or someone else's. Much like writing a speech recognition engine, however, if you plan on easy success you'll be disappointed, but if you plan on a challenge you'll have a lot of fun.