I Tried These Brain-Tracking Headphones That Claim to Improve Focus

Activity trackers have come a long way. No longer mere step-counters, they can monitor your heart rate, blood oxygen level, and skin temperature, and can even detect whether you suffer from sleep apnea. Now, there’s a new wearable for your brain—and I’ve been testing it out for the past two weeks.

Today, Boston-based company Neurable announced the launch of its smart headphones, dubbed the MW75 Neuro, which use electroencephalography, or EEG, and artificial intelligence to track the wearer’s focus levels by reading their brain waves. The device sends this data to a mobile app, with the goal of helping the user tweak their habits to improve their work routine. It’s available for preorder in the US for $699 and will ship this fall. Starting in spring 2025, the device will be available in Europe and the UK for €729 and ₤629, respectively.

“We’ve created an everyday wearable for tracking mental wellness and preventing burnout,” says Ramses Alcaide, CEO and cofounder of Neurable. “This is the ultimate wearable, and it tracks the most important organ in your body.”

Alcaide has been working on the technology since 2011, when he was completing his PhD at the University of Michigan’s Direct Brain Interface Laboratory. He founded Neurable in 2015 with fellow student Adam Molnar, now Neurable’s vice president of strategic partnerships. Considered a brain-computer interface, or BCI, the device is one of several consumer wearables coming onto the market that read and translate a person’s brain signals. (Last year, Apple filed a patent for AirPods with embedded EEG sensors.)

These devices differ from invasive BCIs, like the one Elon Musk’s Neuralink is developing, which use implants that are surgically placed in or on top of the brain. Noninvasive BCIs like Neurable’s collect brain data though the skin—usually with EEG—without requiring any kind of surgery.

EEG is widely used to study the brain’s electrical activity and to help diagnose certain conditions such as epilepsy, brain tumors, and sleep disorders. The technology dates back to the 1920s, when German psychiatrist Hans Berger recorded the first EEG from a teenage boy undergoing brain surgery.

Neurons in the brain communicate via rapid electrical impulses, and EEG uses conductive metal disks called electrodes to record that activity. Current EEG devices resemble swimming caps and are studded with dozens of electrodes. A special gel is typically applied to the scalp to improve signal quality. It’s not exactly the kind of headwear most people would want to wear in public.

Alcaide and Molnar wanted to design an EEG device that people could use outside hospitals and research labs—something people could wear in an office or coffee shop. “This technology is not going to be adopted noninvasively until it’s invisible,” Molnar told me back in March when we met up at SXSW in Austin.

Neurable went through several prototypes before settling on its current design, a pair of noise-canceling wireless headphones made by audio company Master & Dynamic with 12 EEG sensors in the earpads. Alcaide says the company’s sensors capture 80 to 90 percent of the signals that traditional EEG technology can. They can also play music, just like any other pair of headphones.

Neurable cofounders Adam Molnar (left) and Ramses Alcaide.

Photograph: Philip Keith

The brain produces different types of waves, and each is associated with a different frequency range and state of mind. For instance, alpha waves occur in a more relaxed mental state, while beta waves tend to be produced when a person is alert or focused. Neurable’s device primarily measures this alpha and beta wave activity, using AI to decode brainwave data into focus information. The company developed its AI model based on EEG recordings from 7,000 people and validated it in a series of experiments with 132 study participants. Some of those experiments included distractions, such as noisy computer backgrounds or ping notifications. In a 2021 white paper, the company’s model correctly captured around 80 percent of distractions present in its experiments.

I first got a glimpse of how Neurable’s technology works when I met with Molnar at SXSW. In a quiet coworking space away from the bustle of the conference, I put the device on while Molnar opened his laptop and told me to concentrate on the numbers that were about to pop up on the screen. As a random number was generated, I repeated it in my head until a new one appeared. While I was thinking about the numbers, a real-time graph with wavy lines ran on Molnar’s computer screen.

When I began the task, the line started to rise immediately. As I continued to silently read the letters, it stayed relatively steady. When I relaxed and looked away from the screen, the line plummeted. If you’ve ever checked your heart rate graph on a fitness tracker, my brainwave data looked much the same—there were peaks when I concentrated intensely and dips when I took my focus off the numbers.

A few weeks ago, the company mailed me a headset to try out at home. Once you pair it with the app, you can start recording brainwave data. You put the device on like any pair of headphones, open the app, and tap a blue button that says “start focus session.” The app will check the quality of the EEG signal and prompt you to choose the type of task—work, entertainment, study, creative, or other—before it starts tracking.

The Neurable app.

Photograph: Neurable

Back in March, it took several attempts to position the earpads just right to capture my brain data. To get a high-quality EEG reading, the headphone sensors need to make good contact with the scalp, and my long hair kept getting in the way. Over the past few weeks, however, this wasn’t an issue. (Neurable says it has made changes to both the hardware and software over the past few months, specifically to improve it for different head types.)

Neurable defines focus as a time when a person feels absorbed in an activity that requires some degree of skill. That could be working at a computer, playing a video game, preparing for an exam, or engaging in a creative hobby like painting. The headphones work best when you’re stationary; Neurable says if a user is moving around a lot while wearing the headphones, data quality can be low.

Users can earn “focus points” while wearing the device—two for every minute in “high focus” or “medium focus” and one point for each minute in “low focus.” Similar to the 10,000-step goal on many fitness trackers, Neurable sets a goal of 100 focus points each day.

Over the past two weeks, the app provided some insights about my focus levels. For one, it showed that I’m more focused in the mornings—something I already suspected. The app also said I was more focused during my entertainment sessions (when I was reading a book for pleasure) than during my work sessions (sorry to my editors). This might be because working on a computer comes with so many digital distractions or because my job often requires me to switch back and forth between different tasks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I was completing just one work task at a time—such as writing this article—as opposed to multitasking, the app registered more high and medium focus minutes.

One afternoon I was using the device for a little over an hour when I heard a voice in the headset: “You’ve earned a brain break.” Alcaide says the device can detect when your focus is starting to decline and that this feature is meant to help people avoid burnout. “We can tell you when to take a break once we start detecting that your brain is fatiguing,” he says. I didn’t feel fatigued, but I went ahead and took a 10-minute break at the app’s suggestion.

Another day, I collected 200 points in a day and earned a trophy with a “you’re on fire” message. Similar to Fitbit badges, which are designed to reward your physical activity, Alcaide says the idea is to nudge people toward good habits.

It did give me a bit of a boost in the same way that I feel accomplished when I hit 10,000 steps a day on my Fitbit. I can’t say I’ve changed my work habits substantially as a result of using the device, but I’m trying to be more mindful about multitasking. Perhaps over a longer period of time, I would have been able to glean more nuanced information about my focus habits.

All this information was interesting, but I wondered how accurate it was. Like most tech companies, Neurable doesn’t share the details of how its algorithm works. I turned to W. Hong Yeo, a biomedical engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology who develops wearable brainwave-reading devices, to get an outside perspective on whether EEG is really sensitive enough to know when I’m focused and when I’m not.

“It’s possible as long as you can consistently and robustly measure EEG signals,” he told me. Yeo’s current work involves trying to measure cognitive decline in elderly people with EEG.

The challenge with developing wearable BCIs versus invasive ones is that the signal quality is lower because the electrodes have to record through the skin and skull. And whenever there’s any motion, “you’re not going to get good contact with the skin, so your EEG signal may not be captured,” Yeo says.

Because Neurable isn’t making any health claims, its headset doesn’t have to be as rigorously tested as a medical device. Unlike disease detection, which requires many more electrodes placed on specific locations of the scalp, measuring focus is more subjective since there’s no gold standard, Yeo says. The company has ambitions to use its headset as a medical device to monitor brain health and diagnose neurological conditions, but for now, it’s starting with consumer applications.

Still, brainwave data is highly personal, and devices like Neurable’s raise questions about how user data is stored and protected. Molnar explains that the headset converts raw EEG data into focus information, anonymizes it, deletes the raw data on the device, and sends it to the app. That focus data is encrypted, uploaded to Neurable’s cloud, and stored in a database. Users’ personal information, such as their name, email address, and password is encrypted and saved in a separate database.

“At no point in time do we expect to sell this data. That’s not our business model,” Molnar says.

Jennifer Chandler, a professor of law at the University of Ottawa, says wearable technology is increasingly generating personal health data that could be used in ways that aren’t always obvious.

“If someone is continuously using a device like this, there’s going to be a stream of neurophysiological data that could be available for interpretation,” Chandler says. She points to a case in Ohio in which data from a man’s pacemaker was used to charge him on two felonies of aggravated arson and insurance fraud after a fire at his home in 2016.

Chandler can imagine a scenario in which someone is wearing EEG earbuds while driving a car and gets in an accident. If brain data from that device showed that the person wasn’t alert and focused, they could be at fault. While Chandler acknowledges the helpful insights a brain-reading device could provide—she wears a fitness tracker—she says consumers should consider how that data could potentially be used against them.

And that’s one of the big questions with new brainwave trackers like Neurable’s. Will consumers see the benefits as outweighing the potential risks of these devices? Is there a market for tracking focus? Certainly, productivity hacking is trendy among the tech elite, but whether wearable BCIs will have mass market appeal is another thing.

“Once you can interact with your devices just by thinking,” Chandler says. “I think that’s when more people are going to start picking them up.”