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Trying Muse Monitor

Upon researching further on how to use Muse headband's brainwave in real-time, I stumbled upon two mobile applications that can support this. One is called Muse Direct, created by the company Muse themselves, the other one is called Muse Monitor, which is a third-party app created by fellow Muse enthusiast, James Clutterbuck.

He created this app to help users to record their brainwave activity in real-time and saving those files in .csv (excel form). These .csv files will then be uploaded to the Muse Monitor website and they can produce colorful graphs that will allow users to read them. These graphs consist of 5 important waves such as Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.


As you can see here, the app is reading the user's brain activity in real-time. It will change according to how the person is thinking, feeling, doing. There are a lot of factors contributing to the reading as well, such as how the headband is worn on the head, any rough or forced blinking of the eye, whether the user is reading or thinking something or keeping their mind calm, etc.

When clicking the record button, it will allow the user to record their brainwave activity. Once you are satisfied with how long you have been recording, just press the stop button. The recording will directly be sent to your Dropbox account (you have to connect or create a Dropbox account to immediately receive the brainwave recording). This recording will be in the form of a table reading (excel).




Recorded brainwave directly uploaded to Dropbox and can be downloaded 


This is the result of the recording from the video above.
The time can be clearly seen on the bottom of the colorful graph (The time when the recording starts, to the end, and the time interval).

According to my research, each brainwave represents as such:

1. Delta Wave
  • Average people (steady increase every 1seconds)
  • People who have ADHD / people who were in the war and have been shot in the head (their brain tissues are damaged or ruined) provides more delta waves per second, which is not normal/good.
2. Theta Wave
  • State of drowsiness / after waking up / not fully awake yet
  • The transition state after Delta and before Alpha/Beta wave
  • Usually associated with being creative (Hence why people like to do some writing after they wake up instead of doing other activities)
  • Block retrieval of memory (theta block)
3. Alpha Wave
  • Heavily associated with meditation
  • Awake/Wakeful mindfulness
  • Focus
  • Alpha wave is present in all parts of the brain
4. Beta Wave
  • Figuring things out / Thinking / Focus
  • Associated with high performance/anxiety
  • Lowering beta ratio = lowering anxiety
5. Gamma Wave
  • Huge range
  • Subconscious calculation
  • Reality
More details on what each brainwave represents can be searched online or from this video by Dr. Cody Rall.
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