Muse makes a variety of wearable devices aimed at measuring brain and body activity, and [Becky Stern] did a detailed teardown of the Muse S model, revealing what goes on inside the device.
The Muse S is a soft, sleep-friendly biofeedback wearable mounted on silver-plated fabric. Not only does [Becky] tear it down, but she provides loads of magnified images and even has it CT scanned. The headband has conductive fabric embedded into it, and the core of the device is stuffed with three separate PCBs that get pretty thoroughly scrutinized.
While the Muse S is sold mainly as a meditation aid and works with a companion app, there is, fortunately, no need to go digging around with a screwdriver and soldering iron to integrate it into other projects. The Muse S is supported by the Brainflow project which opens it up to different applications. Brainflow is a library intended to obtain, parse, and analyze EEG, EMG, ECG, and other kinds of data from biosensors.
If you think Muse and Brainflow sound familiar, that might be because of another project we featured that integrated a Muse 2 and Brainflow with Skyrim VR, creating a magic system whose effectiveness depends on the player’s state of mind. Good things happen when hardware and software are accessible to users, after all.
You can watch a video tour of the teardown in the video, embedded just under the page break.
Just mind the output voltages, especially if it’s intended for sleeptime use. Don’t want to give anyone beefbrain…
it’s not supposed to have any output voltage…
Having a look at Brainflow it wasn’t clear to me whether it passes all its data through The Cloud (TM) or not.
There are mentions of TensorFlow and ML which seem to suggest that the latter is somehow involved, dunno whether it’s mandatory or just optional.
The last thing I want Da Goog to get hold of is my alpha brain wawes.
brainflow does not collect your data and works 100% locally on your PC
£329!!!
Let’s hope someone creates an open-source design we can put together ourselves at a more affordable price.
Exactly this. I’ve been interested in this sort of thing, but “might drop a tenner or two” levels of interested not “hundreds” levels of interest
I’ll give you 100-1 odds that this is yet another snake oil medical gizmo
Not much “hacking” possible for this rather expensive commercial product. However, the Brainflow software suite seems to be open source and looks promising.
yes, its 100% open sourced abd supports other devices as well
Thanks for the post, Donald, and for clueing me in to the BrainFlow project!