Muse’s Softband will help you meditate your way into a good night’s sleep

By Luke Dormehl January 9, 2019

Muse Softband

Muse, maker of meditation headbands, has unveiled the third iteration of its device (and first soft headband) at CES 2019.

More CES 2019 coverage

The so-called “Softband” helps you meditate as you’re falling asleep by letting users instruct their Amazon Alexa device to play a guided meditation. The headband will then track your sleep behavior using the kind of brain-sensing tech Muse has pioneered through its previous products. When you wake up again in the morning, the associated Muse app will reveal how you have slept.

Over time, it will reportedly help wearers to improve their sleep patterns. Cleverly, the headband will detect when you’ve fallen asleep and turn off the audio meditation — although it will continue to track your sleep patterns.

This news follows another recent announcement by Muse concerning new guided meditations released monthly at a price of $7.99 per month or $49.99 per year. Muse has also revealed that, later in 2019, it will be taking the lid off an “intelligent voice guidance” system that responds to the mental activity of headband wearers to offer a personalized meditation experience for each and every user.

According to TechCrunch, the Softband will offer a variety of other use cases, alongside sleep tracking, although Muse has yet to reveal exactly what these might be. The company’s still got a bit of time to reveal more details, however, since it won’t be launching the product into the market until the fourth quarter of 2019. Customers can reportedly expect to pay approximately the same price being charged for the Muse 2 headband, which would put it in the $250 price range.

The Softband isn’t the only cool bit of sleep-tracking tech on its way to (or already available for) customers. Other existing products in this category include bed-based sensors and even a device you put on your bed stand that then monitors your shut-eye using a combination of ultrasonic pulses and sonar. (For more information,you can check out our sleep-tracking roundup.)

While Muse’s Softband isn’t the only sleep tracker out there, we’d be lying if we said we’re not intrigued to give it a shot once it’s available later this year. Let’s hope it lives up to its promises.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributor

I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.