From meditation to med schools, seeing inside our brains is shaping the future

Many novice meditators often struggle with two main issues: knowing whether they are meditating correctly and staying motivated. Muse addresses both these issues by providing real-time “state of mind” feedback and offering an engaging motivational framework.

The brain-sensing headband uses electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the electrical activity in your brain. The headband is designed as a personal meditation assistant that can pair with any tablet or smartphone and operate with a custom built application. The app trains users in meditation exercises while it also records personal EEG data for reference.

Muse is building a robust platform and a market for its product at the same time. Chief Product Officer Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom told PSFK:

There are a lot of professionals who are using and recommending meditation in their practices and they’re actually using that with their clients. There are executive coaches out there, that are working with CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, who are using Muse in their practices to help a CEO really be productive and also create the boundaries in his or her own life to find balance.

How it works: Different frequencies in the brain activity indicate ranges in our state of mind. This reading is how Muse knows when you are distracted or under stress. The same technologies are used in neuropsychology research every day. As the EEG technology provides robust real-time insight into the brain. EEG is a well-established, non-invasive, harmless method of recording the electrical activity of groups of brain cells. However, the utility of the hardware doesn’t end there. Said Rosenthal-Newsom:

There’s a lot of research institutions that are also on our platform. They’re in academic environments. They’re working on our platform. They’re building applications that have to do with their research. There’s a lot of people out there that are working in really interesting nooks and crannies of the space.

Muse is used in hospitals, clinics, and universities worldwide as a research tool. It helps for scientists, clinicians, and researchers learn far more about than the human brain than what was once possible. In fact, the research domains extend from cognitive neuroscience, to brain health, psychotherapy, music cognition, and more. Institutions currently using Muse in research include Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Mayo Clinic, NYU, McMaster University, University of Toronto, University College London, and many others.

“We have over 120 research organizations and academic institutions who are using Muse,” said Rosenthal-Newsom. “There’s a number of businesses out there who are in the insurance space and in the scientific space that are looking at ways in which to bring it into corporate wellness, for example.”

Muse provides everything you need to build a brain sensing application. When you download the kit for software developers, you get programs, tools and libraries that can visualize brainwaves and other types of data, develop applications in native code, send out data which other programs can interface with, run media, view brainwave and other data in real time, record and annotate it, and apply, replay recorded data or develop and test applications without a headband. Yes, the technology to realize a brain sensing experience is available on the market. People are using them, as co-founder and CEO Ariel Garten told PSFK:

Whether they’re independent, single, garage developers, or small developer teams and companies that build apps, or larger institutions who end up coming and saying, ‘We want to create this purpose ­built experience,’ or ‘We wanted to create this experiential marketing campaign.’ You know, or ‘The agency’s going to create an experiential marketing campaign.’

It’s an exciting time in this industry and as Muse builds out its platform for developers and larger enterprise clients alike, there will be more brain reading coming.

Muse

Meditation via Shutterstock

Originally published at www.psfk.com on March 1, 2016.