This wearable wants to read your mind to decide when to wake you

If you’ve ever been ripped out of deep sleep by a blaring alarm, you know how rough mornings can feel. Muse’s newest rollout aims to make that experience a little less painful. The company just announced Smart Wakeup, a new feature for its Muse S Athena headband. It attempts to key in on the lightest moment in your sleep cycle, and instead of going off at a set time, wakes you up when it actually makes sense.

To be clear, this isn’t an entirely new idea. Plenty of sleep apps and sleep tracking wearables already offer smart alarms. However, most of the existing alternatives rely on movement or heart rate. Muse’s approach, meanwhile, relies on electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors, tracking brain activity directly rather than estimating it. The feature is based on thousands of tracked nights, which the company used to pair brain activity data with how users reported feeling in the morning.

To use Smart Wakeup, you’ll set a wake window before hitting the sack, and overnight, the headband will monitor your sleep via its built-in EEG sensors. When it detects a lighter stage of sleep within your predetermined wake window, it will use gentle sound cues to ease you out of sleep. The goal is to keep users from undoing a decent night of sleep with a poorly timed alarm.

Smart Wakeup also fits into Muse’s broader sleep toolkit, which already includes guided sessions and features meant to nudge users into deeper rest. It also works for naps, so it’s not just limited to overnight use.

There are, however, a few catches. Smart Wakeup only works if you’re wearing a Muse S Athena headband to bed, which isn’t exactly the most low-effort setup. Not everyone will sleep comfortably with a strap around their head. It’s also locked behind a subscription, requiring a Muse Premium plan that costs $13 per month. If nthose aren’t deal breakers, the new feature rolls out on August 15.