Muse: The sleep tracking wearable watching your brain
The sleep tracking wearable Muse S device monitors the brain orchestra of sleep
Nick wearing the Muse S device
Does the Muse work for sleep?
How accurate is Muse sleep tracking?
What is a digital sleeping pill?
Can you sleep with the Muse 2?
There are a lot of questions floating around about the latest generation of the Muse ‘brain sensing’ headband.
And while this novel ‘gadget’ used to be solely for meditation style brain training, the recent development of the Muse S headband has overseen an exciting new entry into the sleep tracking wearable space.
Where most sleep tracking still seems to be happening on the finger or wrist, the science of sleep continues to highlight the incredible importance of understanding the orchestra of brain activity underway while you get your nightly shut-eye.
“Orchestra” is a word we use quite deliberately, as our interview guest today will reveal, because sleep is an impressively complex process. Many of us who track our sleep have heard of ‘light sleep’, ‘deep sleep’ and ‘REM sleep’ - and perhaps we are even fooling ourselves into thinking we can tell which of these phases our brain via our finger or wrist…
But even this level of knowledge is still not doing sleep justice - these are actually necessary simplifications for all of the non-brain monitoring sleep tracking solutions to save face.
Turning to the gold standard ‘polysomnography’ you’d receive in a state of the art sleep lab, you’d have your brainwaves directly monitored and be provided no less than five stages of sleep, growing to six if you also count ‘awake’ as one of the phases.
The truth is, the only way to even begin to clearly differentiate between these phases of sleep is to measure brainwaves directly (everything else is just an algorithmic guess).
Interestingly, the Muse S sleep tracking headband wearable seems to have finally made this possible (with the research to back it up).
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Muse S: Watching your brain as it sleeps
What differentiates Muse S clearly from the competition is that it (1) tracks sleep at its source (your brainwaves) and (2) has 200+ research studies to its name, which speaks volumes about the quality and reliability of the Muse headband system, as well as its leadership team.
As we got hands on with the Muse, it was clear that the quality of the product was also high. The Muse S headband is well-designed: soft, lightweight, very comfortable and even has a ‘futuristic’ feel. While its sleep tracking phone app leaves a lot to be desired, the exciting ability to visualize your brainwaves directly will quickly help most to overlook its UI challenges.
Notably, we connected with their company mission to “Pioneer a new era of mental and emotional health through innovative neurotechnology & AI to drive personal growth” as well as their vision to “Unlock the brain, revolutionizing health”. What follows here is our interview with their CEO (that’s, Chief Evangelism Officer!) and Co-Founder Ariel Garten.
One of our intentions in the interview was to of course more fully evaluate the most prominent marketing claims on their website (focusing on sleep), including
“While many devices gauge sleep stages using movement and heart rate, Muse brings precision to the forefront with EEG measurements. We tap directly into the source - your brainwaves - the gold standard for discerning sleep stages.”
And
“While others count the minutes you spend in light, deep, and REM sleep, Muse uncovers the ‘when’ and ‘how’. When is your deep sleep most restorative? How does your sleep position affect awakenings? With Muse, you explore the facets of your sleep that truly matter.”
So, let’s get down to business…
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How does Muse sleep tracking work? Is Muse an EEG?
Click on the ‘+’ symbol below to see each question and answer.
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Today, A Longer Life is excited to dive into the world of brain-sensing technology with Ariel Garten, founder and Chief Evangelism Officer at Muse. Muse has been a pioneer in brain-sensing technology, known for its Muse Brain Sensing Headband, which has been around for quite a few years now. Recently, Muse released an updated version, the Muse S, which now includes sleep-tracking capabilities. We’re here to explore this latest feature, discuss how it connects brain-sensing with sleep health, and dig into what it can offer users.
We’re intrigued to learn about how brain-sensing links up with sleep-tracking technology. I actually used one of the original Muse headbands for meditation, and for someone like me who’s been practicing meditation for nearly 20 years, the biofeedback was an incredible tool. Technology has come a long way since then, especially with the Muse S. It’s designed to be soft and comfortable—so much so that you can wear it at night and almost forget it’s there.
Question: Now that it’s a sleep-tracking wearable, can you introduce us to how it functions as a sleep tracker?
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The Muse S is our latest brain-sensing headband, designed to enhance brain health by supporting both meditation and sleep. Some people might be familiar with home sleep tests, often used to screen for conditions like sleep apnea. In sleep research labs, EEG (electroencephalogram) and EMG (electromyogram) sensors are applied to measure brain activity, muscle tension, and other factors to assess sleep. With the Muse S, we’ve integrated these same kinds of sensors into a lightweight headband that you can wear comfortably at home.
The Muse S features four EEG (electroencephalography) electrodes, two on the forehead and two behind the ears to monitor your brain activity during sleep. It also includes a sensor to measure your heart rate and an accelerometer to detect movement, similar to an in-lab sleep test. Together, these sensors provide data that approaches the quality of a polysomnography (PSG) study in a sleep lab.
Our goal was to improve the sleep-tracking experience by creating a sleek, comfortable device that offers polysomnography level insights from the comfort of your own bed. Muse S tracks your brain’s transition from wakefulness into sleep and follows the changes in brain activity throughout the night to give you an in-depth look at your sleep patterns.
What are digital sleeping pills?
ALL Question: Can the Muse S now distinguish between lying motionless while awake and actually being asleep?
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Yes, absolutely! That distinction is made possible by analyzing brainwaves. When you’re lying down with your eyes closed, the EEG patterns in your brain are significantly different compared to when you’re asleep. Even though other parts of your body, like your wrist or finger, might not show a clear difference between these states, brain activity reveals the shift from wakefulness to sleep almost immediately.
In fact, we have a feature called the "digital sleeping pill" that’s precise enough to detect, and even anticipate this transition from being awake to entering stage one sleep. As you move from wakefulness into the early stages of sleep, it adjusts the audio content you’re listening to, helping you fall asleep faster by synchronizing with your brain’s shifting state of consciousness.
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The term “digital sleeping pill” is intriguing. At first glance, it might sound like a catchy marketing phrase. I haven’t tried it yet, but I definitely plan to!
Question - Can you explain what the digital sleeping pill really does?
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Of course! We all know the appeal of taking a pill to instantly fall asleep, but aside from supplements like magnesium, many sleep aids can disrupt sleep quality or affect alertness the next day. The digital sleeping pill offers a non-invasive way to guide you into sleep by using real-time feedback from your brain activity.
It works by selecting a piece of audio, such as a bedtime story, guided meditation, or calming soundscape. This audio draws your focus away from any anxious or wandering thoughts that might prevent you from sleeping and helps you relax. Imagine it like a bedtime story when you were a child, where a kind adult noticed when you were drifting off and adjusted their voice to match your drowsy state. Similarly, the digital sleeping pill observes your brain’s transition from wakefulness into sleep and adjusts the audio to cue your brain that it’s safe to let go and sleep.
As you enter stage N1 sleep, the Muse S lowers the volume and modifies the content to encourage deeper sleep. If you fall asleep, it gradually turns off. If you start to wake up again, it brings the audio back to gently guide you toward sleep once more. This feature has been especially beneficial for people who have trouble falling asleep, they find it calming and effective.
If you continue to wear the Muse S throughout the night, it will re-activate the digital sleeping pill if you wake up in the middle of the night, providing the same audio experience that helped you initially fall asleep. Over time, your brain associates this audio with sleep, creating a natural sleep cue.
Muse sleep tracker: “sleep lab” quality, at home
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The Muse app provides hypnograms, allowing users to view their own sleep stages while using the device. We also touched on another term related to hypnograms, which is EEG, and specifically polysomnography, often considered the gold standard in sleep analysis.
Question: Could you introduce polysomnography and explain why the Muse S can be described as a sleep lab at home?
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Polysomnography, or PSG, is a multi-faceted approach to sleep analysis: "poly" means "many," "somno" relates to sleep, and "graphy" is about recording data. Essentially, polysomnography records and categorizes sleep across various dimensions. In a traditional sleep lab, technicians measure EEG brain activity, muscle movement, body movements, and respiratory patterns. Remarkably, the Muse S can capture similar information from the surface of the head, providing essential sleep data without all the equipment of a full lab setup. This gives users the ability to obtain sleep stage information at home that would traditionally require a lab visit.
In sleep labs, a technician typically analyzes EEG data to categorize sleep stages, creating what’s known as a hypnogram. This manual process is labor-intensive, requiring human expertise. With Muse, we've developed an automated algorithm that analyzes sleep data and stages it with accuracy comparable to that of a skilled technician. We measure this using Cohen’s Kappa, a metric that assesses agreement levels between experts on the same sleep data. Our Cohen’s Kappa is 0.76, which actually exceeds the 0.75 considered “expert level.” In other words, Muse's AI-based system matches—or even slightly surpasses—human expert accuracy in classifying sleep stages.
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That’s a strong validation for calling the Muse S an “at-home sleep lab.”
Question: Could you also clarify how the brainwaves detected by the Muse S’s EEG sensors are connected to sleep stages, which are traditionally scored by experts?
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The Muse S’s EEG sensors track brainwave patterns that correlate with different sleep stages. Sleep is an extraordinary process orchestrated in the brain, bringing a range of restorative benefits for the mind and body. The headband’s EEG readings allow us to capture this orchestration and identify sleep stages, providing users with accurate insights into their sleep health. It’s as though you’re experiencing a personalized sleep study each night, all from the comfort of home.
How the Muse S helps choose your optimal pillow
ALL Question: How does the Muse S track sleep position and its impact on sleep quality?
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I often fall asleep facing a certain direction because my husband, who’s on the other side, has a habit of watching videos on his phone before bed and sometimes snores. My sleep position directly impacts my sleep quality, depending on what’s happening around me. I’ve noticed that I start the night facing away from him, but once he’s asleep, I tend to shift and settle into a position that helps me enter deeper stages of sleep.
Seeing this pattern has been incredibly insightful and even led me to rethink my choice of pillow. For instance, side sleepers typically need a pillow that supports the space between the shoulder, neck, and base of the head, while back sleepers benefit from a thinner pillow. If you think you’re a back sleeper but notice from the data that you spend most of the night on your side, it might be worth reconsidering your pillow choice.
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This data on sleep position, whether you’re on your side, back, or moving between, can also show correlations with stillness and restorative sleep periods. It’s an unexpected but valuable level of insight from the Muse S headband. You’ve touched on a really practical outcome of using Muse S for sleep tracking, optimizing pillow choice based on sleep position.
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This can significantly improve sleep comfort and quality. Plus, for people who snore or have partners who do, sleep position can be very impactful. For instance, many people with sleep apnea find that sleeping on their side, rather than their back, improves their breathing and the quality of their sleep. Ultimately, understanding how sleep position affects sleep quality can have a meaningful impact on how rested and refreshed we feel the next day.
The Muse can finally tell:
asleep or awake?
ALL Question: Is the Muse S finally able to distinguish if you’re asleep or just lying still and awake?
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It can be difficult to distinguish between a waking brain and one in REM sleep, with one key difference being that our bodies remain motionless during this time, a phenomenon known as catatonia. While we are immobile, our eyes are moving rapidly from side to side—that’s why it's called Rapid Eye Movement (REM). This stage of sleep allows for a unique type of brain activity, where we often experience dreams. These dreams are thought to help us process and reorganize information: pulling up memories from our past and integrating them with new information gathered throughout the day.
REM sleep plays a crucial role in memory consolidation, emotional processing, and some researchers even believe it may assist with the process of forgetting. For example, we want to forget irrelevant details—like the location where we parked yesterday—so they don’t interfere with our current memories, such as where we parked today. This active curation of our memories is an essential function during sleep.
When we wake up, our brain enters a more chaotic, yet orchestrated, state, with changes in brainwave frequencies that help facilitate restoration and processing, contributing to our overall health and sense of well-being.
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A fascinating aspect of Muse S sleep tracking is its ability to calculate restoration points based on slow-wave intensity. In the app, this feature quantifies the amount of slow-wave activity, which is linked to the restorative effects of sleep. This data is an excellent measure of how refreshed or restored we feel after a night’s sleep. Slow-wave sleep is particularly related to the brain’s deep sleep frequencies, like delta waves.
Question: why is the feeling of being refreshed or restored overnight related to the total amount of slow wave intensity and slow wave frequencies, for example the alpha and delta waves.
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In deep sleep, which typically occurs in the early stages of the night, your body and brain undergo the most significant restoration. Ideally, about a quarter of your total sleep time should be spent in deep sleep. However, many people don’t get enough of it—despite sleeping 6, 7, or 8 hours, they may not be getting the requisite 2 or more hours of deep sleep. Deep sleep is incredibly restorative, and during this phase, brainwaves like delta waves synchronize to produce a symphony of activity that supports physical and mental restoration.
Digital sleeping pills:
Remember being read a bedtime story?
ALL Question: How does the Muse Digital Sleeping Pill use biofeedback to help users fall asleep and stay asleep during the night?
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When you were a child, you might have experienced a kind adult reading you a bedtime story. They would slow their voice as you drifted off, watching your eyes flutter closed until you were sound asleep. The Muse Digital Sleeping Pill works in a similar way, using biofeedback to guide your brain from wakefulness into sleep.
Muse tracks your brain's transition into stage N1 sleep and adjusts the audio you're listening to in real-time. As you begin to fall asleep, the audio softens and eventually turns off. If you stir and don’t quite fall into N1, it gently reintroduces the audio to ease you back toward sleep. Users who struggle to fall asleep or wake during the night often swear by its effectiveness.
What makes this feature especially powerful is how it conditions your brain. If you wake during the night, Muse automatically replays the same audio cues that helped you initially fall asleep, reinforcing them as a sleep trigger. This biofeedback approach ensures you’re supported not just at the start of the night but also if sleep disruptions occur.
The comparison to a soothing, attentive parent guiding you to rest is a beautiful one, and now this same experience is offered through the advanced technology of Muse. It’s an innovative way to calm the mind and foster a restful night—one I can’t wait to try out myself!
Muse S sleep tracking the entire ‘orchestra’ of a good nights sleep
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Sleep is very complex, but with direct brainwave tracking the Muse S sleep tracking can observe how the brain's activity changes during. Talk to us about the complexity of sleep and its stages.
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Imagine an orchestra where the trumpets are playing a fast melody, the timpani are keeping a different rhythm, and the cellos are moving at a much slower pace. During the day, our brain functions in a similar way. Different regions of the brain are constantly working on various tasks, leading to brainwave patterns that appear complex and dynamic. When you look at a spectrograph of brain activity, you'll see a mix of brainwave frequencies, high beta waves during focused thinking, other amplitudes and frequencies in different regions, creating a “busy” but coordinated brain activity.
When we transition into sleep, however, the brain begins to operate like a perfectly synchronized orchestra. Instead of different areas working at their own pace, the brain starts to harmonize. This process begins when you close your eyes, which triggers an increase in alpha brainwave activity, a frequency associated with relaxation and internally focused attention. Beta waves, which are linked to active thinking, give way to slower alpha waves as the brain settles.
As you move deeper into sleep, the brain enters a state marked by delta waves, which are slow, rhythmic brainwaves (1–4 Hz). This progression is signaled by the appearance of sleep spindles, bursts of coordinated brain activity thought to play a role in memory consolidation. Delta waves dominate during deep sleep (Stage N3), where the entire brain pulses in a synchronized rhythm, like a steady drumbeat. This synchrony is believed to support the transfer of information across different brain networks, enabling communication between regions that may not interact as effectively during waking hours. This process is essential for consolidating knowledge and memories.
When we move into REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement), the brain becomes remarkably similar to its waking state, making it difficult to distinguish between the two from a brainwave perspective. However, during REM sleep, our bodies remain still, a phenomenon called catatonia, while our eyes dart back and forth, giving this phase its name. REM sleep is a time of vivid dreaming, during which the brain pulls together fragments of past experiences, reorganizing and integrating them with new information learned during the day. This stage supports memory processing, emotional regulation, and may even involve the selective forgetting of unnecessary details.
That’s the end of the interview, unless you want to see the FULL INTERVIEW and BONUS CLIPS.
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