I’ve Been Using A Wearable Meditation Device Called BrainBit Mindo–And Here Is How It Can Help You
A review of my experience using BrainBit Mindo, and how it compares to other neurofeedback devices like Muse 2 and Mendi
I’ve been exploring different tools to better understand my physical and mental health, and one device that’s really caught my attention is the BrainBit Mindo that I would like to share my review on. Mindo is an EEG headband designed to monitor brainwave activity in real time. It tracks your brain’s electrical signals through 4 sensors placed around your head, allowing you to see changes in brainwaves like alpha, beta, and theta.
It comes together with apps like Neurofeedback and EEGWaves that help to track meditation, manage stress and sleep tracking, as well as do training with neurofeedback games.
What I’ve used BrainBit Mindo for so far
Outside of Mindo’s Neurofeedback games, where I am practicing to control the game environment with my mind, I have done a bunch of experiments with Mindo that helped me develop better understanding of how various activities and stimuli affect my brain, eg:
- My recent post where I compared sleep stages tracked by Garmin Vivosmart 5 and brain wave activity tracked by Mindo. While Garmin focuses on movement and heart rate to estimate sleep cycles, the BrainBit Mindo provides deeper insights by analysing my brain’s activity during the same periods.
- Another post where I described how I used Mindo to track how NeuroVizr Motivation sessions impact my brain. As those sessions were designed to increase focus, by monitoring brainwave patterns, I could actually see measurable increases in concentration during and after the sessions.
How does Mindo compare to Muse and Mendi
Some of the other neurofeedback devices that I tried include Muse and Mendi.
All 3 offer brain training programmes with their apps:
- BrainBit’s Neurofeedback app offers a large variety of game-like sessions that aim to train concentration, relaxation, improve sleep, fight anxiety and reduce stress. After each training, the app display the score for each session and a longitudinal progression of all sessions. While I find it quite difficult to understand how concentration sessions work, I really like the relaxation programmes where you listen to calming music with white noise increasing or reducing depending on the calmness of your brain. Separately to Neurofeedback app, BrainBit offers the EEGWaves app that allows you to see more detailed analysis of brainwaves distribution throughout the session.
- Muse 2 is another EEG device that I used. Similarly to BrainBit Mindo, it uses EEG sensors to provide real-time feedback during the sessions. Muse has a large variety of meditation programmes where real-time feedback is provided in a form of audio sounds that aim to return a wandering mind to a controlled state. The app provides richer data per session than BrainBit’s Neurofeeedback app, however, it is not as thorough as EEGWaves app, and it doesn’t have concentration training programmes.
- Mendi is not an EEG device, but instead detects changes in the brain’s local blood flow and oxygenation in response to neural activation with fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy). The Mendi app had got only one game that is aimed to boost concentration and focus. I found it fairly difficult to understand how to control the object in the game with my mind, but also the stats in the end of the game were rather unclear to me. I also tried to compare my focus levels using BrainBit and Mendi at the same time (yes, my forehead can take both headbands 😂), and the results were rather sporadic and not matching each other.
Summary
Overall, the BrainBit Mindo has been a powerful tool for gaining insights into how various activities and stimuli affect my brain on a much deeper level. For anyone interested in neurofeedback, this is a tool worth exploring.
