Musings from Philippe

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Sleeptracker monitor Key Features

Magid: Devices Measure Quantity, Quality of Sleep

By Larry Magid, Mercury News

Apple’s Beddit comes in second to the Sleeptracker by Beautyrest, which has better features for couples.

One of the criticisms of the Apple Watch is that there is no native sleep monitoring, but that’s not keeping Apple from wanting to measure your sleep. Instead, the consumer electronics giant last year acquired Beddit, a sleep detection device that’s composed of a plastic strip that you put under your bottom sheet, to measure how you sleep. Apple just released the newest version of Beddit (3.5) with an accompanying iPhone app.

As is often the case with new Apple product categories, Apple is not the first to market a sleep detection device that connects to the bed. And, as is sometimes the case, the Apple product isn’t best of the breed. I installed the new Beddit device to compare with the Sleeptracker by Beautyrest monitor that I’ve been using for about a year and prefer the Sleeptracker.

Beddit is available at Apple stores or at Apple.com for $149.95. Beautyrest Sleeptracker lists for $199, but Amazon is currently selling it for $116.14 while Sears.com now has it for only $69.99.

The Apple and Beautyrest devices have a few things in common, but they differ in important ways. First, the Sleeptracker works with both Android and iPhone while Beddit only works with iPhone. Second, a single Sleeptracker product works with two sleepers so, if you share your bed, you and your partner can both get sleep data. You would have to buy and install two Beddit products to measure two sleepers. With Beddit, you need to have the phone in the room, while Sleeptracker connects to your home Wi-Fi network and can work independently of the phone, once it’s set up. During setup, the Sleeptracker app asks if a pet sleeps on your bed to make sure the pet doesn’t affect your readings.

Also, Sleeptracker uploads your data to powerful cloud-based servers, according to Philippe Kahn, CEO of Fullpower, the Santa Cruz company that developed the product for Beautyrest. Kahn said that the data is anonymously compared with data from thousands of other users to give people a basis of comparison. He said that the company adheres to strict European privacy guidelines in all markets, including the U.S.

Having more information about your health – including sleep data – is a good thing

Another big difference is that the Sleeptracker sensors go under the mattress instead of on top of it. I could actually feel the Beddit strip as I was lying in bed. The Sleeptracker sensors are undetectable, except maybe to the protagonist of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Princess and the Pea.”

Unlocking the secrets to a better night’s sleep

Asleep. We spend about a third of our lives in a state of slumber. Increasingly documented as a key component of human well-being, sleep enables us to recover and regenerate physically and mentally. Getting too little of it or having poor night’s sleep creates an imbalance that has knock-on effects on cognitive ability, mood, and general performance. For example, the coaches and medical staff at Hintsa Performance emphasize sleep as one of the 6 key components of success for high-level athletes and business people, in what is described as the Circle of Better Life. In The Sleep Revolution, Arianna Huffington claims, “We are in the midst of a sleep deprivation crisis,” and details the consequences society will face socially and economically if we do not adequately address our sleep habits.

Yet, for all the various tips and tricks proposed to improve sleep it remains a largely obscure state that many of us rarely reflect upon – unless you have a bad night’s sleep. Some of us are more aware of the importance of sleep. Severe sleep disorders afflict as much as 16.6% of the population worldwide, if not more, according to a 2012 Warwick University study. There are a number of challenges in researching sleep disorders; however, new technologies are paving the way for improved means of gaining valuable insights into sleep.

Three innovative areas that ETH Zurich currently investigates could hold the answers to optimizing sleep.

Tracking Brain Activity

The SleepLoop project is developing a device in the form of a headband that measures and analyzes brain waves, subsequently playing a matching sound to stimulate deeper sleep. One of the major impediments to traditional sleep studies is the bulky equipment required to measure the subject, often requiring them to sleep in the lab. SleepLoop’s wearable technology optimizes data collection providing quality results that are faster, cheaper, and affords greater comfort to human subjects taking part in the study. This technology could potentially deliver a cure to sleep disorders without the need for drug therapies and may have applications in the prevention of certain brain diseases.

Don’t Hold Your Breath

Scientists in ETH Zurich’s Organic Chemistry Lab have increased 5-fold the sensitivity of their sleep measuring devices using secondary electrospray ionisation (SESI). “This sensitivity is sufficient for our SESI devices to be used for breath analysis in medicine,” says Professor Pablo Sinues. One of the applications Sinues and his team are investigating is the analysis of exhaled breath in order to diagnose sleep apnea. Their future projects include looking at how to simplify instruments to deploy in clinics and doctors’ offices.

Rock-a-bye Baby

Originally created to study the optimal rocking movements for falling asleep, researchers have reengineered the Somnomat bed to study snoring. In both cases, the Sensory-Motor Systems Lab envisions an autonomous robotic platform capable of monitoring, detecting, and self-adjusting as the user sleeps. By customizing the bed to an individual’s preferred conditions, the bed will be able to guarantee a good night’s sleep.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Complimentary to all of these research areas is the work led by ETH Zurich alumnus Philippe Kahn at the California-based company Fullpower Technologies. Drawing on their knowledge of big data, machine learning, and AI, they have developed the Sleeptracker® platform to analyze over 250 million of nights of sleep from millions of individuals worldwide. Their results notably show that there is a genetic predisposition to being a morning or an evening person. According to Kahn, “The challenge is that our modern society tends to force everyone to a schedule inherited from the early days of the industrial revolution. This in turn means that there is about 25% of the population that may not perform optimally on a recommended modern schedule.”

It turns out that in addition to the science of sleep providing solutions to sleepless nights, we may also need to adapt some of our societal parameters to offer more flexibility to account for different sleeping habits and preferences.

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