My Muse EEG meditation headband has a dead battery

I bought a Muse EEG headband a couple of years ago on an Indiegogo crowdfunder thing. Which means I paid for it about four years ago because it took two years for them to get into production. But they did get it into production and good on them because it actually works. If you’ve never heard of the Muse, it’s an EEG device that tracks brainwaves while you meditate and relays audio feedback via an Android or iOS device to help you regulate your meditation.  Various sounds represent your level of calmness so that you can stay focused on the meditation.  In my experience it works very well and seems to accurately track your mental state via brainwave activity.

Anyway this isn’t a review of the Muse it’s more of a complaint. The thing has worked very well apart from the odd dodgy iOS app update but recently the battery has turned to shit. I’d get a couple of hours use out of it in the early days but now it can’t even get through a single 20 minute session after a full charge. I wrote to Muse giving them the chance to redeem themselves by offering me a new one for free but they merely offered to sell me another whole device with a bit of a discount. Umm no thanks.

There are a couple of problems with the battery setup in this device. Firstly it’s not easily replaceable as it’s a small lithium polymer battery soldered to a PCB inside one of the pods on the side of the unit. Secondly you can’t even run the device while it’s on charge with a USB cable plugged in. So now that the battery hardly holds a charge I need to do something.

There’s a tear down video on YouTube so after watching that I realised it’s actually pretty easy to open up the thing. And having done that the battery looks reasonably straightforward to replace with a bit of soldering. And after considerable searching on eBay I found a battery that looks like an exact match for the original in Hong Kong (3.7v lithium polymer 552030 20mm x 30mm x 5mm in case you’re wondering).

I’ve ordered a couple since I’ll need to replace it again in two years time. $12 each including postage wasn’t too unreasonable and considerably less than buying a whole new unit. Shame on you Muse!!

Stay tuned for part 2 where I bring the Muse back to life or kill it for good.