Muse and meditate: This brain-sensing headset can keep you cool, calm and composedMumbai, May 9(AZINS) Muse is a brain-sensing headband that connects wirelessly to your smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth, detects and analyzes your brainwaves using the EEG sensors present on the headband. You get to perform informative and interactive exercises that help you calm your mind while the headband measures the changes in your brain activity and allows you to see your results in real-time on your device. You are able to track your brain's performance over time helping you achieve a reduction in stress and anxiety, increased focus, and improved emotional intelligence helping you feel more balanced.

Muse combines health and wearable technology in a meaningful way, combining software and hardware with biometrics in order to monitor, analyze and enhance cognition and brain function. For those of us that want to empower ourselves by taking control of our brain function will find a helpful aid in the form of this headband. Muse allows for being in control of your own brain health by finally being able to see their brain's behavior using easy-to-understand feedback that anybody can comprehend.

The device connects the phone via Bluetooth on Android or iOS and is very easy to set up. I was able to get the entire thing set up in the matter of a few minutes. The Read Me guide that came along with the device had everything I needed to know before getting the device started.

Muse begins with calibrating the application by understanding your brain activity. The application will ask you simple questions to be able to take a snapshot of your brain during an active state and then use that as a reference point. The application also requests that you do not change your breathing and instead just count your breaths.

The application gives you real-time feedback in terms of how calm your brain is using a weather system. If your brain is calm, the weather in the application is calm. If your brain is active, the weather starts to become more aggressive and noisy. Using this feedback you can correlate what you are thinking about and how your brain is reacting to it. In that sense, Muse can be a very powerful tool. With its use, you can tell what kind of thoughts prevent you from being calm.

Since it's application is simplistic, you can do things like listen to music and see if the music is helping calm your mind. You can substitute listening to music for reading or any other activity you find calming. The feedback from the application will help you understand if the aid you are using to keep you calm is actually helping or not. There is also a custom application by the name of Muse Monitor that currently only works on older Muse headsets that is able to capture EEG brainwave data that can be exported to your computer for further processing. Applications like this one show the real potential of this device and the limitless possibilities that come with it. I absolutely love my device and the calm I feel as a result of it and I can't wait to see the kinds of applications that developers come up with using the tools provided to the community.

What you need to know

Works on: iOS, Android versions 2.3 and above, Mac OS X 10.8 and above and Windows 7 and above.

Battery: Rechargeable battery that charges via micro-USB jack and lasts for 4.5 hours of use.

Sensors: 7 sensors capable of reading 4 channels of data - two on the forehead and two behind the ears.

Adjustability: The headband is adjustable to be able to accommodate for various forehead sizes.

Pricing: Rs 16,650 excluding shipping and duties