Sailing, Mountains, Music, and Technology
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!
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!
Philippe Kahn founded Borland, Starfish Software, LightSurf, and Fullpower Technologies. He talks to Leo Laporte about writing Turbo Pascal, inventing the first cameraphone during the birth of his daughter, and the data-driven science of sleep tech.
Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation.
Congratulations Michael, Jeffrey and Michael for your unveiling of the molecular mechanisms that control the circadian rhythm.
Yes, our three science heroes have figured out that while we sleep our “protein batteries” get recharged and during the day our “protein batteries” get depleted. It all seems to work in rhythmic patterns timed by the rotation of planet earth. That’s the molecular-biologists’ confirmation of what the data shows, analyzing millions of night of sleep with the Sleeptracker deep learning solution among other things.
Further, the data shows that in eachsleep cycle, each phase of sleep (deep, light and REM), is essential and contributes to regeneration. With every complete sleep cycle, the mind, body and soul get regenerated. On average, for Ms. and Mr. Everyone it takes a total of four sleep cycles to get reasonably recharged and to perform emotionally, intellectually and physically the next day. Using a car as an analogy, think of deep sleep as the engine, light sleep as the body, and REM as the wheels. You need them all, equally, cyclicly, and multiple times during one night, or in separate naps.
From an evolutionary standpoint, genetic research has now established that 25% of us are night owls and perform best at night, 50% are morning larks, and the rest can perform both as owls and larks. What a fantastic opportunity to help Ms. and Mr. Everyone sleep better!
Again congratulations Michael, Jeffrey and Michael for your unveiling of the molecular mechanisms that control the circadian rhythms and for winning the Nobel prize.
In a nutshell, the Sleeptracker® Monitor is about small day-to-day non-invasive improvements for Ms. and Mr. Everyone using the principles of CBM (Cognitive Behavioral Modification) that add-up over time to improved sleep in the comfort of one’s home. Polysomnography (PSG) is about wearing a battery of sensors and monitors for diagnosing potentially life-threatening sleep disorders such as severe apnea in one or more sessions in a sleep lab. Both PSG and the Sleeptracker® Monitor are complementary and “compatible.” Big data and AI are what drive the innovation in the Sleeptracker® Monitor.
The Sleeptracker system is focused on Cognitive Behavioral Modification and understanding what simple practical matters impact our daily sleep. The idea is to improve sleep for Ms. and Mr. Everyone with small adaptations suggested by AI working with big data sets. With millions of users and millions of nights of sleep to draw from, the Sleeptracker AI engine helps to give us immediately actionable personal insights as to what impacts a night of sleep. The AI engine observes short, medium, and long-term personal daily sleep patterns and compares the Sleeptracker user to hundreds of thousands of people “just like me” to provide actionable personal insights. Through this process, the Sleeptracker user can experience and quantify for themselves the effects of making measured changes to their sleep routine. The data show key impacts to our sleep quality are directly tied to daily exercise, proximity of meals to bed-time, alcohol consumption and stress. These behaviors which directly affect sleep are handled privately, confidentially and securely for the purpose of understanding and further improving using the principles of CBM. Throughout the night, and completely non-invasively, the Sleeptracker® Monitor continuously monitors breathing rate, heart rate, motion, wake-up and out-of-bed events. In time, monitoring will expand to include air quality, ambient noise and temperature of the sleeping environment to provide greater insight into environmental impacts to one’s sleep. For example, sleeping with a partner, pets on the bed and the impact of children on sleep are important factors which the Sleeptracker AI-engine takes into account. With CBM, the AI-powered coaching agent suggests simple actionable tips that help improve sleep for Ms. and Mr. Everyone, a little at a time.
By contrast, Polysomnography (PSG) is focused in today’s medical world in identifying candidates for CPAP machines. That’s very important and probably the most actionable matter that is derived from PSG study as sleep apnea is a potentially life-threatening condition. One must remember, the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle (HUP) shows the measuring apparatus of an experiment impacts the outcome of the experiment. Anyone who has participated in a polysomnography study knows how invasive PSG can be to sleep. In fact, often the PSG requires patients be monitored multiple nights to obtain a clear understanding of their tendency to apnea due to the invasive nature of the equipment and restlessness from not sleeping in one’s home environment. Most agree that an important part of sleep hygiene is a consistent schedule and conducive sleep environment. Diagnosing apnea and the prescription of CPAP machines is a multibillion-dollar business and of course is indispensable to those diagnosed. The Sleeptracker® Monitor is meant to be a complimentary product to PSG and not meant to diagnose, but to provide insight into sleep patterns and the measured changes one can make to improve one’s sleep routine.
Correlation of the Sleeptracker® Monitor to Polysomnography is accomplished through a fully operational onsite PSG lab staffed by a licensed sleep specialist. While the focus is on CBM rather than diagnosing apnea, this ongoing calibration ensures the Sleeptracker® Monitor delivers greater than 90% accuracy compared to invasive sleep monitoring. Accuracy is focused on time to fall asleep, sleep efficiency, wake-up events, respiration rates, heart rates and REM sleep.
We’d be happy to have you try the Fullpower sleep lab for a complete free and confidential sleep study if you’d like. Here is an article by Fortune magazine that is two years old and describes our sleep lab and how we use it: http://fortune.com/2015/06/29/sleep-data/
In conclusion, as the data sets grow with Fullpower’s advanced AI methodologies, we learn more and more about our sleep and how the quality of our sleep compares to “people just like me” in a non-invasive sleep environment. Using CBM, we make small modifications that help significantly improve our sleep and health over time. For severe sleep disorders, PSG and a trained MD are key for prescribing a CPAP machine and treating the sleep disorders. For everything else, the Sleeptracker® Monitor offers valuable insight and actionable coaching into one’s sleep routine for a better night’s sleep.
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
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
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
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.
Congrats to our CEO and founder Philippe Kahn on being selected by the most prominent tech guru Walt Mossberg as one of the top 5 most influential technologists ever. http://www.golocalprov.com/business/Tech-Guru-Mossberg
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
Sharing photos from a phone is easy as breathing these days, and we have Philippe Khan to thank for paving the way. In June 1997, he achieved a technological first that would be repeated countless times in the following decades: he shared a digital photo instantly.
Philippe Kahn may not be a name you’re familiar with (or maybe you are) but his contributions to early mobile technology and social media are difficult to overlook.
It was 20 years ago this past Sunday – June 11, 1997, to be exact – that Kahn snapped a photo of his just-born daughter Sophie with a mobile phone and shared it over the Internet with around 2,000 friends, family and business connections.
View at TechSpot
© 2001-2025 Musings from Philippe