By now, you might be familiar with the Muse by Interaxon Inc. brain-sensing headband, which measures your brain activity to help you wind down through meditation. The latest version released at CES 2020, the Muse S, is made of more comfortable fabric and offers new biofeedback-enhanced meditation to help promote better sleep habits and help you journey off to slumber.
The headband, which is made of soft, breathable, flexible plush fabric, slips around your head, positioned over your forehead and right above your ears. Because of the flexible fabric, it can stretch to fit on a wider variety of head sizes. This also makes it easier to bring the headband with you on travels, stuffing it into a purse, backpack, or carry-on luggage. It measures real-time brainwave feedback via EEG, checks your heart rate, breathing, and your meditation posture.
But the coolest part: it works with new Go-to-Sleep Journeys that combine soothing voice guidance with biofeedback soundscapes that respond to your physiological state to offer a personalized bedtime soundtrack. Ideally, the next-generation headband would come with built-in headphones. For now, you need to wear a separate pair of headphones overtop it for the audio guidance. Once combined, the neurofeedback device and premium content offers guided meditations with responsive learning functionality to help you meditate.
Go-to-Sleep Journeys include ones like “Enchanted Forest” and “Underwater World” and include a calming voice from a meditation teacher. After just a few minutes lying down with the headband and headphones, despite being in a loud and busy room at the show, I found myself being instantly calmed by the soothing woman’s voice who was guiding me through my relaxation. Before it ended, I was almost drifting off to sleep! My mind was wandering away from the show and into my own little quiet and calming oasis.
Once finished, you can view your results in the app, including how calm your mind was during the session (I clearly have a lot of work to do based on the pictured results which showed that I was only 20% calm!), your heart rate (mine dropped quite a bit at only 47 beats-per-minute (bpm) compared to my usual about 68 resting heart rate), and how still you were (I was still, as per the image, only about half of the time I was under the Muse spell.) You can also set goals to achieve so you can improve your ability to relax and meditate over time.
You can subscribe to Guided Meditations if desired, which provides you with access to a library of more than 300 meditations from renowned meditation teachers, along with relaxation techniques, Go-to-Sleep soundbars, and curated guided meditation collections geared toward certain areas in which you want to improve, like getting better sleep, improving your performance, and reducing stress.
The headband can run for up to 10 hours per charge of its lithium-ion battery and connects to your phone and the headphones wirelessly via Bluetooth. The app is compatible with iOS 11 and Android 5 and higher devices.
We’ll let you know when this comes to Best Buy Canada and you can check the Best Buy website for all Muse products currently available.
