If you find it hard to focus or stay present in the moment, you can now buy a device that tells you just how often your mind drifts elsewhere.
That's the thinking behind the first wearable from a wellness startup called Atlas. The idea is to help you understand how your brain operates in different scenarios so you can optimize for the activities that matter, whether it's work or social encounters.
The Atlas 1.0 is an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor that sticks behind your ear using an adhesive pad on your skin, and continually measures your brain activity through the day. It also captures your electrodermal activity, movement, as well as speaking activity and speech patterns (and not the actual words you're saying) using additional sensors.
Those signals are fed to Atlas' AI-powered system to understand your level of presence or attention, the degree of stress you were under, and how much energy you expended during any given activity – such as attending a meeting, spending time with your family, or handling a task at work.
Looking at those stats in the companion mobile app, Atlas claims you'll get a sense of when you were performing well and when you weren't doing so great.
"Was I really present for dinner with my family? Who makes me feel more like myself? Do I actually perform better under pressure? Why am I defining a successful run in minutes rather than stress relief? When I'm exhausted, what do I still show up for?" These are the sorts of questions Atlas hopes to answer for you with its sensor-packed device and AI smarts.
The company says that over months of logging, you'll have high-fidelity patterns from which you can interpret how you function in these different circumstances, and identify when you were at your best.
That should guide you to replicate the conditions that enabled you to focus and engage better. Or as Atlas puts it, "identify the patterns, people, and habits that drive peak performance."
Atlas claims its algorithms are trained on the world's largest real-life brain activity dataset, with more than 500,000 brain recordings.
That's plenty, but the proof will really be in the baked-over-several-months pudding. I can see the appeal of something like this in today's environment of multiple screens vying for your attention and cumulatively harming your ability to stay present. The question is, how useful is data as a weapon against these formidable forces of distraction?
You'll have to wait a bit to find out. The San Francisco-based Atlas company, which has raised $24 million to develop activity-monitoring products, says this wearable will set you back by US$500 to start. You'll also need to shell out $30 a month for fresh sensors, adhesives, and subscription to AI services to mine insights from your data.
The first three months' worth of these are included with your purchase; pre-orders are open now, and deliveries will begin in the first quarter of 2027.
Check out the Atlas wearable on the company's website.
Source: Atlas
