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Musings from Philippe

Sailing, Mountains, Music, and Technology

Sleepless in Switzerland

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.

Visit Thrive Global to read the original article.


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Zion Market Research is an obligated company. We create futuristic, cutting-edge, informative reports ranging from industry reports, company reports to country reports. We provide our clients not only with market statistics unveiled by avowed private publishers and public organizations but also with vogue and newest industry reports along with pre-eminent and niche company profiles. Our database of market research reports comprises a wide variety of reports from cardinal industries. Our database is been updated constantly in order to fulfill our clients with prompt and direct online access to our database. Keeping in mind the client’s needs, we have included expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends in this database. Last but not the least, we make it our duty to ensure the success of clients connected to us—after all—if you do well, a little of the light shines on us.

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How the Berkeley earthquake impacted sleep patterns around the Bay Area

Did you feel the earthquake last night and did you wake-up?

We felt it all the way in Santa Cruz, our dogs woke up first, they felt something and then we both woke up as the bed was shaking.

On the lower graph, you can see the percentage of sleepers within 75 miles of the epicenter who woke up. And you can also see that it takes a while to get back to sleep. Courtesy of Sleeptracker!


Happy 2018 Sleep Report courtesy of the Sleeptracker AI platform

 

Figure 1 Self-explanatory: NY parties the most, and surprise, Las Vegas the least. The explanation is simple: That’s because Sleeptracker users in Vegas actually work in Vegas and are not visiting to party. In our little piece of paradise in Santa Cruz, SurfCity, we tend to go to bed early to catch the surf in the morning before work.

Figure 2 is about heart rate and the effects of alcohol on sleep. After studying millions of nights of sleep we noticed that alcohol pumps up heart rates significantly. We can see this here when on NYE, people tend to drink more. And guess what: The younger crowd drinks much more and heartrate gets significantly affected.

Fascinating!

 


Optimizing Your Sleep

What does the data tell us?

The fantastic team of Fullpower Scientists, using the AI-powered Sleeptracker® platform to analyze several millions of nights of sleep from millions of individuals worldwide, dating all the way back to 2011 find that:

– 23% of sleepers are Owls (perform best in the evening)

– 28% Larks (perform best in the morning)

– 49% are pretty much able to perform in the morning, or the evening either way

Morning vs Evening Person: Lark vs Owl

Yes, it’s genetic. If you are not a morning person and can’t fall asleep before late at night or if you love getting up at 6am and feel sleepy by 9pm, it’s not your fault, you may be genetically a night Owl or a morning Lark. No matter where you stand in both of those extremes, it may simply be genetic.

Humans adapt. We’ve evolved from Paleolithic ages by adapting to changes. Yet we are genetically programmed to perform the best in some particular circumstances. The latest research shows a genetic link to being a night Owl or a morning Lark.

A team led by Daniel Katzenberg at Stanford University looked at 410 randomly selected adults to assess their tendencies as morning Larks or night Owls. Among other things they took blood samples and looked at the gene named “Clock.” They concluded that the Larks bio clock was up to one hour ahead on the average to the one of the Owls. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9779516

It seems that the world population is made out of one quarter of Night Owls and one quarter of Morning Larks. The remaining half of the population seems to perform equally well at sunrise or sunset. 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.” You can think of it as lefties being forced to be right handed. Although as humans we can adapt to being ambidextrous, it’s not comfortable. If Kelly Slater were forced to be goofy footed, would he still be the greatest surfer? https://www.surfertoday.com/surfing/7527-the-best-goofy-footers-of-all-time

Owl or Lark? How to Identify your Chronotype

In 1976, the International Journal of Chronobiology published a paper by researchers Jim Horne and Olov Östberg. There is a questionnaire with 19 questions, available on the Internet and published. Here is a link to the original. https://www.cet.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Horne-1976-IJC.pdf

Can you change an Owl into a Lark?

Especially if you are night Owl, society and social life and work schedules may impose stress. Of course, it is always possible to adapt. But it is not advised to change sleeper type. Be a proud Owl or Lark. Don’t force unnatural adaptation. Lefties should be happy lefties and Kelly Slater should not be forced to compete goofy-footed.


“1997: The Birth of the Camera Phone” Wins Industry Accolades

SAN FRANCISCO, July 25, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — The short film, “1997: The Birth of the Camera Phone,” has been selected as both a Vimeo Staff Pick and as a featured film on the Short of the Week website. Created by Conscious Minds, the film depicts how technology innovator Philippe Kahn (currently CEO of Fullpower Technologies) instantly shared the first camera phone photo of the birth of his daughter. That iconic photo was included in Time Magazine’s 2016 list of the 100 most influential photos of all time.

“I was fascinated by the rather odd story of that day in the hospital when all the components of his project finally came together,” said Jonathan Ignatius Green, the director of the film. “It seemed like a true story that you wouldn’t believe if you saw it in a movie. That’s my favorite kind.”

“While we didn’t even realize the Conscious Minds team had created the film until we saw the final product, it captures that momentous day amazingly well,” said Kahn, the creator of the camera phone. “It is a great honor to have this film chosen as short-of-the-week and to reflect twenty years later how the camera phone has been a game changer for society in so many ways.”

The film can be viewed on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/221117048 or the Short of the Week website at https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2017/07/24/birth-camera-phone/.

Philippe Kahn is currently CEO of Fullpower Technologies, a startup focused on improving sleep through the AI-powered cloud-based IoT Sleeptracker® platform that has been commercially deployed by three leading bedding brands, Beautyrest, Serta, and Tomorrow Sleep.

More information and previous films from Conscious Minds can be found on their website at http://www.weare.cm.

About Fullpower Technologies, Inc.
Fullpower is the leader for cloud-based IoT smart-home and wearable solutions powered by AI, machine-learning and data science. With more than 125 patents, the Fullpower IP portfolio covers the AI-powered Sleeptracker® and the MotionX® IoT technology platforms. Fullpower’s business model is to license technology and IP as a PaaS to brand leaders such as Nike, Beautyrest®, Serta®, Movado® and others. Founded by Philippe Kahn, creator of the first camera phone, and based in Silicon Valley, the Fullpower team is passionate about AI, machine learning, IoT and PII.

Contact:
Leslie Ruble
Fullpower Technologies, Inc.
info@fullpower.com
831-460-7070


Happy Birthday Camera Phone! Your Papa Is Very Proud of You

This photo of Phillipe Kahn's newborn daughter, taken on 11 June 1997, was the first digital photo ever shared instantly via cell phone

This photo of Phillipe Kahn’s newborn daughter, taken on 11 June 1997, was the first digital photo ever shared instantly via cell phone

Twenty years ago, at the Sutter Maternity Center in Santa Cruz, Calif., while his wife was in labor, Philippe Kahn hacked together a Motorola StarTAC flip phone, a Casio QV digital camera that took 320 by 240 pixel images, and a Toshiba 430CDT laptop computer. When he took a picture with the camera, the system would automatically dial up his Web server and upload the picture to it at 1200 baud. The server would send email alerts to a list of friends and family, who could then log on and view the photo.

It wasn’t a brand new concept for Kahn; he’d spent about a year working on a Web-based infrastructure that he called Picture Mail. Picture Mail would do what we now call “sharing”—that is, one user would upload a photo and text, designated as something to share with a particular list of contacts (say, “friends,” “family,” or “colleagues”). The system would send email notifications to everyone at that list, directing them to visit the host Web page to view the picture. Kahn says he was aiming to be the Polaroid of the 21st century, providing “Instant Picture Mail” that would be a digital update of Polaroid’s vision of the instant camera.

What he hadn’t gotten around to building was the consumer hardware piece of the puzzle. Photography wasn’t going to be instant if you had to hook your camera up to your computer and go to a particular website every time you took a picture.

“I had always wanted to have this all working in time to share my daughter’s birth photo,” Kahn recalls, “but I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.”

Thanks to his wife spending 18 hours in labor at the local maternity center, he had a little time to build the prototype. He realized he had most of what he needed with him—in particular, the phone’s car kit, including a plug that allowed the phone to connect to a car speaker system. For the rest of what he needed, he asked an assistant to make a run to Radio Shack and drop off the additional gear at the hospital.

“It’s always the case that if it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done,” Kahn says.

Kahn got it working before the baby came, and 11 June 1997 has gone down in history as the birth of a whole new world.

Some call this milestone the beginning of the camera phone. It’s not exactly that; Kahn acknowledges that others had put photo sensors in phones before. And it’s also not the first time someone sent someone else a digital photo on the Internet. But it was the first time that a photo went from one person to a broad list of his friends and family members instantly, with just a touch of a button. Kahn now calls the milestone Instant Share, and points out that this is the way social media still works today—you upload an image once to a site that stores it, and then notifications are broadcast and people follow a link back to the stored image.

Today, of course, instant sharing of photos—evolving to videos—is everywhere. It’s the idea behind Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook Live. It has changed the way we connect with our friends and the world, and changed the way we experience things. For many, it’s hard to put the phone down and watch something interesting without sharing an image. Camera phones have even spawned dystopian visions of a world in which everything is shared, as in “The Circle.”

All this, looking back, seemed to grow organically. But, according to Kahn, that wasn’t exactly the case. He had to do a lot of plowing to prepare the soil, to extend the metaphor.

“After the baby,” he says, “I spent the next month integrating the design, using a microcontroller, a CMOS sensor, and a phone.” In early 1998, he founded a company around the technology, Lightsurf, and eventually received a handful of patents on the work, he recalls.

He took the technology, he says, “to Kodak, Polaroid, and [other camera companies]; they all had wireless camera projects, but none of them could imagine that the future was digital photography inside the phone, with Instant-Picture-Mail software and service infrastructure. They collectively came to the conclusion that phones would be focused on voice—this was before texting—and that cameras would become wireless.”

Having struck out in the U.S., Kahn moved on to pitch Japanese companies. He had no luck with dominant mobile phone service provider Docomo, but found enthusiasm at J-Phone. J-Phone, he says, then brought in Sharp to design their “Sha-Mail” (translated as “Picture-Mail”) phone, and the product was a success.

Back in the U.S., Wired magazine covered Kahn and LightSurf, prompting Sprint to contact him; Sprint worked with LightSurf and Casio to launch the first U.S. camera phone in 2002.

Quick, what's the most recent photo on your phone? For photo sharing pioneer Philippe Kahn, it's a selfie of him with his wife, Sonia Lee, on the beach.

Quick, what’s the most recent photo on your phone? For photo sharing pioneer Philippe Kahn, it’s a selfie of him with his wife, Sonia Lee, on the beach.

Even from the early days, Kahn says, he had a sense that instant photo sharing really was going to change the world. “Citizen journalism immediately came to mind; we were documenting the birth of my daughter, but that was just the beginning.” He believed that other, more political events would be documented, “and it has happened. People can’t hide things anymore. There is always someone with a camera phone taking a video; people can’t just claim that something didn’t happen.”

Bob Parks, who interviewed Kahn for the Wired article in 2000, confirms Kahn’s prescience. Parks says: “He was telling me things like, ‘In the future people will document crimes using video on their phones. Then everyone will know the real story.’ At the time I was skeptical. I thought, ‘OK, guy, I guess we’ll see how that works out.’”

For Kahn personally, the invention worked out quite well: LightSurf was acquired by Verisign in 2005 for approximately $270 million, the intellectual property scattered in later sales and, Kahn said, was tussled over in courts. Kahn is no longer involved with the technology—he has a new startup, FullPower Technologies, that has developed under-the-mattress sensors and cloud based artificial intelligence to gather data and personalize recommendations to help customers improve their sleep. But he’s thrilled watching phone-based photo sharing explode around the world.

“If you go to Africa, people don’t have laptops. They have phones with cameras and they do everything with them—sell things, buy things, telemedicine. If a person’s house burns down these days, their pictures aren’t lost, their memories are stored in the cloud. I see tourists with selfie-sticks and I think it’s fantastic, the more cameras the better. It’s a fantastic power to be in the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Everyone.”

And that rush to cobble together a prototype in the maternity room? Absolutely worth it, Kahn says: “The picture of my daughter’s birth was a magical, unique, instant moment and worth a million words.”

(Kahn narrates a reenactment of the birth in the video below; the building of the prototype starts at 1:35.)


A baby girl and the camera phone were born 20 years ago

Twenty years ago Sunday, Philippe and Sonya Kahn spent 18 hours at a hospital in Santa Cruz, waiting for their baby Sophie to be born. Like nearly all expectant fathers, Philippe Kahn planned to take a picture of the new baby but, instead of waiting till he got home to distribute the photo to friends online, he wanted to do it directly from the hospital. But that was in 1997 when there were no camera phones. So he invented one.

Kahn, who previously founded Borland International and Starfish Software, had already configured a home server to store images, automatically notify friends about new images and send them a link so they could view them via the web. But there was no way to get the pictures to the server directly from a camera.

Philippe Kahn took the first ever cell phone picture of his then-newborn daughter Sophie in Santa Cruz County.
Philippe Kahn took the first ever cell phone picture of his then-newborn daughter Sophie in Santa Cruz County.

Kahn had a Casio QV-10, the first consumer-grade digital camera with an LCD display that, he said, “made pixelated but nice 320 by 240 pictures.” He also had a Motorola StarTAC “flip” phone, so during Sonia’s 18 hours of labor, he thought about finding a way to connect the two so he could upload a picture of the baby directly from the hospital.

“It was clear that I had a hardware problem. Short of taking the phone apart I needed to interface with the phone,” he said in an interview.

He also needed to connect a laptop to control the camera/phone connection. Phones then couldn’t connect to either laptops or cameras but – as he pondered the problem – he remembered he had a StarTAC speaker phone kit in his car which, of course, could connect to the phone. With his wife’s blessing, he “literally ran down to my car, took out the whole speaker phone kit and started working frantically at creating a software/firmware/hardware interface” that enabled him to send the pictures from the laptop, which was connected to both the camera and the phone.

As luck would have it, he finished this Rube Goldberg device just in time for the arrival of Sophie and snapped what was not only Sophie’s first picture, but the first picture taken by what eventually evolved into the camera phone.

Kahn’s server sent links to this image to friends, family and colleagues and he started hearing from people who were impressed at how quickly he got this picture from the hospital to their screens, which made him realize he had a potential product.

“Immediately it became clear that we needed a CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) sensor and a micro controller unit integrated in phones. So we built these prototypes that were interfaced with the exact software/server/service-infrastructure,” he said.

With a prototype in hand, Kahn tried to convince the CEOs of Kodak and Polaroid to create an integrated phone and camera “but none of them could imagine that the phone would be the integrating device.” He said that they “hired consultants, market pundits and they all collectively came to the conclusion that phones would be focused on voice and that cameras would become wireless.” Both Kodak and Polaroid later went bankrupt.

“They totally missed the paradigm shift,” said Kahn.

Unable to find a partner in the U.S., Kahn took his idea to Japan but had no success with big players like NTT Docomo. But he did find interest from a small carrier called J-Phone, which, in 1999 partnered with Sharp along with Kahn’s company LightSurf, to design a “Picture-Mail phone.” In 2002 Kahn’s company worked with Sprint and Casio on the first U.S. camera phone.

Sprint loaned me one of those first phones to review. I picked it up at their office on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles and, after leaving the office, I found a parking ticket on my car. Convinced that it was an unjust ticket, I used the phone to document my surroundings to prove why I shouldn’t have to pay the fine. The Los Angeles Parking Citations Bureau disagreed and I didn’t bother to appeal, but it nevertheless convinced me of the power of always having a camera in your pocket.

Today, I routinely use my camera phone to help me remember where I park my car. I take pictures of luggage tags, receipts and the price tags of items I’m thinking of buying. Of course, like most people, I also use my phone to photograph people, animals and scenery. Truth be told, the pictures I take with my smartphone often look just as good as the ones I take with my $1,000 camera.

Kahn’s current company, Santa Cruz-based Fullpower, develops cloud-based technology to power sleep tracking, analog smartwatches and other “Internet of Things” products.

Both my kids were born before Kahn built that camera phone so I wasn’t able to use a phone to transmit pictures of my kids’ births in near real time. But millions of fathers have since instantly shared pictures of their newborns to loved ones far and near. Happy 20th birthday to both the camera phone and Sophie Kahn.

View the original at Mercury News.


The Camera Phone is 20 Years Old!

When Philippe Kahn and his wife were expecting their first child, his plan was to photograph the event using his smartphone so he could share the event with friends and family. The only problem was that it was 1997 and smartphones hadn’t been invented yet. So, Kahn did what any mathematician / technological envelope-pusher would do: he shoehorned a miniature camera into a Motorola cell phone and—voilà!—on June 11, 1997, Kahn could share pictures of his newborn baby girl, Sophie, with about 2,000 friends and family members. You know where the story goes from here.

Though it’s difficult to imagine a world without “picture phones,” they began making cameo appearances in futuristic science-fiction films long before smartphones began decimating the bottom lines of camera manufacturers.

The very first wireless picturephone prototype, which was also known as the “Intellect,” was developed by Daniel Henderson, in 1993, but because the Internet was still in its infancy, there wasn’t much he could do with it—in comparison to the gymnastics modern smartphones can perform.

Apple’s Videophone made the rounds at trade shows, in 1995, along with other experimental devices from Kodak, Olympus, and Canon, but we had to wait until the year 2000 before we could step up to the counter and purchase one of our own.

Depending on whom you ask and how you define a “true” camera phone, the first commercially available camera-enabled phone was either the Samsung SCH-V200, which was introduced in June, 2000, or Sharp Electronics J-SH04 J-Phone, which was introduced 5 months later, in November of 2000.

Do you remember your first camera phone?


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