Interaxon, the company that has made it easier for countless people to meet their meditation, brain health, and wellness goals, has unveiled its newest creation, the Muse S Athena. This new headband marks a world first thanks to its combination of EEG and fNIRS technologies. One month ago, the company sent us one to test, and below, we reveal what we discovered.
The Canadian-based company Interaxon has been hugely influential in the Godbold household. Although my wife and I have long been interested in meditation, it wasn’t until we were introduced to their Muse headbands that it ‘took off’. We’ve found their Muse 2 and Muse S devices so effective that neither of us has gone without using one for well over a thousand days.
When Interaxon launched the Muse S in January 2020, it was a gigantic leap forward in wearable neurotechnology. A little over five years later, I wanted to know if the Muse S Athena offers a similar advancement? Read the review below to find out.
As I sit here compiling my thoughts on Interaxon’s newest release, many thoughts spring into my mind, such as the noticeable visual and build-quality enhancements, technological advancements, new app features, and the doors into the minds that these will open.
When I place the Muse S and the Muse S Athena side-by-side, I can’t help but think of the evolution from combustion cars to electric cars (EVs): The new Athena has smoother lines and houses some mind-boggling technology that was seemingly unthinkable a few years back. As with an EV, the tech-laden Muse S Athena does have a higher price tag; however, unlike what’s been seen with Western automotive manufacturers’ pricing, it’s not prohibitive.
Using cars to compare the new Athena model with the previous S model might seem odd; however, I am confident that everything will become clearer at the conclusion of this review.
Let’s start things off by looking at what the new model brings to the world of consumer neurotechnology:
The Muse S Athena comes with a whole raft of improvements over the Muse S. Let me take you through the additions and the most significant upgrades:
Advancements in Sensor Technology
EEG + fNIRS Integration: As mentioned at the beginning of this feature, the Muse S Athena is the first consumer wearable to combine Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) sensors. The addition of the fNIRS (pronounced ‘eff-nears’) is truly an enormous leap forward as it allows users of Anthena to measure brainwaves, as per the Muse S, and at the same time, they can now track their oxygen levels in the brain’s frontal cortex.
The primary metric tracked by the fNIRS is blood oxygenation in the frontal cortex, which serves as a proxy for cognitive effort and endurance. Higher oxygenation levels typically indicate increased brain activity, such as during tasks requiring focus or concentration, while lower levels may reflect a relaxed state, desirable during meditation.
Although the addition of the fNIRS might sound like something for more advanced meditators, it isn’t. It is a technology that is beneficial for meditators of all experience levels.
For beginners, the fNIRS data provides feedback on their ability to focus and relax, helping them discover a preferred meditation technique. For those with more experience, the data offers a deep insight into cognitive performance and mental endurance, making it easier to explore more advanced states of consciousness and fine-tune focus during specific meditation exercises.
Enhanced EEG Sensors: Although I have never felt there were any issues with Muse S’s EEG sensors, some meditators on the specialist Facebook groups I participate in have wished for improved sensor accuracy for research purposes. The good news is that Interaxon has listened and addressed this, as the new model boasts SmartSense EEG technology, which is said to provide significantly more accurate brainwave detection.
As someone switching between both versions of the Muse S, I have noticed a marked difference in the data output, particularly concerning the Brainwave power band data. When using the Muse S, my Alpha waves often exceeded 15dB, whereas when using the Muse S Athena, I haven’t seen anything above 12dB, which is much more in line with what I expected.
Cognitive Fitness Insights
Cognitive Performance Tracking: The Muse S primarily focused on meditation and basic sleep tracking, whereas the Athena expands into real-time feedback on cognitive performance.
This can be broken down into three main areas:
- Focus: Helping meditators to optimise concentration and eliminate any distractions.
- Endurance: The tracking of cognitive effort to help build mental stamina.
- Recovery: Monitors how well the brain recharges.
Personalised Training: The Athena goes beyond the Muse S by offering tailored neurofeedback training powered by Muse’s AI-driven Foundational Brain Model (FBM), a model trained on over 80,000 EEG sessions.
Sleep Optimisation
This is where I must raise my hand and admit: “I haven’t fully utilised either the Muse S or the Muse S Athena for sleep tracking.”
We use a phrase in England, which goes by, “Each to their own”; for those unfamiliar with colloquial English, it simply means that different people like different things. In the past, I have attempted to use the Muse S to track my sleep and have been able to produce workable data. However, I like to sleep as nature intended (sans everything), and although 100s of thousands of Muse users can find it easy to drift off into the ‘Land of Nod’ wearing a Muse headband, I am not one of them.
Therefore, to ensure that this review is as comprehensive as possible, I have based the following sleep-tracking information on what has been previously published by Interaxon and others:
- Improved Sleep Tracking: The Muse S provided basic sleep tracking, but the Athena enhances this with overnight monitoring of brain oxygenation and SpO₂ levels, potentially aiding in early sleep apnea detection.
- Go-to-Sleep Journeys: Building on Muse S’s sleep support, the Athena offers responsive audio experiences to help users fall asleep more easily, improving the overall sleep experience.
Design and Usability Upgrades
Earlier, I mentioned that the Muse S Athena is a significant improvement over its predecessor in terms of looks, thanks to new colour schemes, a newly designed front module, and markedly better-quality headband material.
The Muse S’s front module (above) is bright grey, clearly looking like it was made of plastic, and is paired with a navy blue band. Although it is a superbly capable device, its looks were far from its calling card.
For their latest release, Interaxon decided that something as groundbreaking as the Athena needed an outer to match its uber-impressive inner.
Two colour versions are available with the Athena: Carbon, which I tested, and a lighter Opal colour (shown below), which looks more silvery and, dare I say, is “more in your face.”
Thanks to its more curvaceous design, the front module in carbon colour is discreet and impressive. The overall look can be elevated further when paired with a dark headband.
Although the module on the front of the Athena is, like its predecessor, made of plastic, the darker colours make it less noticeable.
Some of the modules’ visual upgrades are more obvious than others. I particularly liked the addition of the two white pinprick LEDs, which are super helpful in helping the user position their headband correctly. One common ‘irk’ with the Muse S was difficulty centring the headband correctly, particularly in a dark or poorly lit environment. When using the phone screen as a reflective surface in the dark, the two lights will illuminate the user’s nose, making finding the correct position more straightforward.
The differences between the two become more evident when you look at the headband’s material and sensors. Interaxon adopted a shiny, light-coloured, smooth coating with the Muse S to denote the sensor positions. Constant use would cause the coating to become discoloured/dirty, cracked, and less considerate users found it could eventually wear away. Also, the Muse S’ headband could be prone to stretching, which resulted in technical issues. The more robust design of Athena’s band leads me to believe this would be much less of a problem.
As with the front module, the Athena headband has a premium feel in the hand. Although I find both headbands unobtrusive, the Athena band feels more comfortable, as it is softer and boasts a more flexible fit. In addition, the Athena headband has silver-thread fabric EEG electrodes, which offer better conductivity when compared to Muse S’s conductive silver ink adhesive electrodes.
Another improvement with Athena’s design is that Interaxon has ditched using Micro-USB and embraced the modern world by switching to USB-C, which results in faster and more reliable charging.
To round off this improvement summary, we’ll move to App Integration and Features:
The Muse app for the Athena includes a new interactive neurofeedback experience where users can control an owl’s flight using mental effort. The app supports both eyes-open and eyes-closed training, adding a dynamic, gamified element not present in the Muse S app.
My first experience of this came during the onboarding lessons, and to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. Although the owl took off and flew, the more I focused on making it fly faster, the more it fought against me!
I have tried this brain training game a few times with mixed results. On some occasions, things will go well, and I will be rewarded with the option to swipe my finger up the screen to enable the owl to cover more ground by gliding at high speed. At other times, despite doing what I presume is focusing, it will sometimes stop flying altogether.
As luck would have it, while writing this review feature, I had the S and Athena headbands in front of me for comparison purposes, so I put on the Athena and gave ‘owl flying’ another try. Fortunately, I had one of my best flights yet.
Why the Electric/Combustion Car Comparison?
At the beginning of this feature, I mentioned automotive evolution, and in this section, I’ll explain why.
Make no bones about it: the Muse S Athena is a vast improvement over the Muse S. Better looks aside, its technology is mind-blowing, which in turn opens up a whole raft of new possibilities, including significantly more comprehensive brain health insights and more advanced cognitive fitness training.
However, when you ask most people driving a combustion car why they have yet to embrace electric power, two of the main stumbling blocks are the cost and range anxiety, i.e., not having enough battery power to do what they want. The latter of these two applies to the Athena.
The addition of all the groundbreaking technology in the Muse S Athena would appear to have come at a cost, and I don’t mean it in financial terms. Before I get into the bones of what I perceive this cost to be, I should stress that the unit sent to us for review would be one of the first off the production line, so others may not share my experience. However, based on my investigations, I am not alone in my thoughts.
After countless tests, the cost of the additional technology, mainly the fNIRS, is the impact on battery power, specifically when doing a meditation session: I can do three-hour-long meditations with a fully charged Muse S, and it will not have dropped a bar on the battery gauge. From my tests, with a single hour-long meditation using the Muse S Athena, I estimate that the battery life will have at least halved.
I started exploring community boards to ascertain whether I was doing something wrong or possibly testing an Athena with a faulty battery. I soon found the answer on the Mind Monitor forum.
Mind Monitor community members performed tests and provided a graph showing that the fNIRS potentially drained the Athena battery by 1% per minute on Android phones during meditation. For someone like me who can meditate for up to two hours at a time, this is a problem as it produces something similar to range anxiety, hence the electric car comparison.
On the weekends, I usually treat myself to up to three hours of daily meditation, and the last thing I want is to think about is recharging the unit, how long the battery power will last or being distracted by screen glancing, particularly if I am enjoying a constant stream of ‘birds chirping’. Admittedly, most will not be meditating for as long as I do, so it is likely that this will never become an issue.
I have not uncovered any negative comments regarding using the Muse S Athena for sleep tracking, which leads me to believe that some more power-intensive technologies are being turned off or toned down when this feature is used.
An hour-plus meditation is one of my great pleasures, thanks to the constant flow of ‘happy chemicals’ I experience, and with a clear mind, I seem to be able to produce results that other meditators consider impressive. An example of this comes from last week when I decided to treat myself to an hour-plus Saturday morning meditation using the Muse S; the results can be seen below.
N.B. If you would like to take your mind into another realm for multi-hour periods and feel that you don’t need the mass of extra technologies that come with the Muse S Athena, there is another option. It’s Interaxon’s Muse 2 headband, which, before Athena’s introduction, was many meditators’ go-to device. It is also available to purchase on the Muse website.
Final Thoughts
The Muse S Athena headband is a brain training tour de force and a giant leap forward compared to the Muse S, thanks to its seamless combination of cutting-edge EEG and fNIRS technology.
It is head and shoulders above others as a technological tool to help with meditation, brain health and sleep tracking. However, as I have detailed above and based on my testing, I cannot proclaim it as perfect yet, due to the technology seemingly outpacing current battery technology.
Hopefully, the clever people at Interaxon will find a way to update the app with the option to turn off the fNIRS during meditation. Alternatively, they could follow Mind Monitor’s lead and provide toggles for 4, 8, or 16 Channels, each with Low or High power options. It is possible, and should this happen, it will bring Athena closer to the ‘perfect’ moniker it deserves.
In the thousands of words I have written about Interaxon and its Muse products, I have never written anything negative, and I do not consider the above as such. Even without any battery life ‘tweaks’, it is still a hugely impressive device.
The Muse S Athena is a cutting-edge device that will thrill those who prioritise their health and meditators of all experience levels, and as with company’s previous models, it will undoubtedly become a staple in neuroscience and medical researchers arsenals worldwide.
How to Purchase the Muse S Athena and Pricing
The Muse S Athena is available to purchase via choosemuse.com.
The device with a one-year premium subscription (my recommendation) is listed at $519.98 USD, or €459.98 in the EU. However, orders placed before May 15, 2025, will benefit from a further 15% discount, which is automatically applied at the checkout.
If you want to learn more, Interaxon’s website offers in-depth information on the company and its products, citing research and collaborations with Harvard, NASA, IBM, MIT, Yale, and more.
Alternatively, you can type ‘Muse’ in the Luxurious Magazine search box to read our articles on the company and its products.
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