As someone in the sleeptech space, I feel like this is written by someone who doesn't understand sleep.
It isn't just "peptides" and "circadian rhythms". Sleep is about much more than just being unconscious, which why sleeping pills don't solve the problem of sleep, they solve the problem of consciousness.
Sleep is what your brain and body do during the time you are asleep. Just because you're unconscious, doesn't mean you are getting good sleep.
At my company SoundMind we're identifying bursts of brain activity in your deepest sleep called Slow-Wave Oscillations (SWOs). When we detect an SWO, we have a short window in which to stimulate your brain, which causes your SWOs to increase in both power, and the number of slow waves. This results in up to 40% improvement in the performance of deep sleep. This is an improvement to the most important part of sleep, which is why we're starting here. SWOs are responsible for the clearing of Amyloid plaques, memory consolidation, and regulation of hormones such as GH, cortisol, insulin, and prolactin.
Love the project and concept. Signed up to your email list.
My first company was a DARPA R&D contracting firm and at one point we made our own EEG's. We solved some interesting problems but being in a helmet in a war is probably an easier use case than a head band that's comfortable to sleep in... What are you using for electrodes in your prototypes? Do you use an aerogel or the usual synapse paste? I can't imagine a consumer product would work for the later but maybe the former.
The state of the art for my old applications seems to now be micro/nano scale electrodes, from only a quick google. I've been out of the space for a bit shy of a decade so I'm interested to know how far it's come and how you're going to make the product comfortable.
I'll do a blog post about our electrodes after our patents are submitted.
We are not using any gel or water. It took us over 6 months of experimenting and re-implementing different papers, before we came across our current design. Which was the result of a fortuitous accident.
The design we're currently using, I've had for over 1 month with no degradation in signal quality - I live next to the ocean, so lots of salt in the air, and I try to treat the electrodes badly. The other bands that we have in use are also maintaining good signal over the few weeks of use.
The formula we're working on with industrial design atm is the balance of comfort, signal quality (maintain connection - as I said, electrodes are now good), and robustness.
I came across that same paper just the other day. No, we haven't. We've done some experimentation on increasing REM, but we're pretty focused on improving SWS with our first stimulation.
There are lots of other stims in the pipeline, and lots more research to done! It's a super exciting space.
I've had some experience with lucid dreaming myself, but it isn't an area we're currently interested in pursuing. It's fun when you don't wake yourself up.
One anecdote from our early development. When I was using one of our early stims, I woke up when it should have held me in deep sleep. I was a bit disappointed, as I'd had good results for a few days. Then I realized, I wasn't hearing the stim, so I actually wasn't awake. That realization woke me up. :)
Well, I think it would be cool to correlate whatever sleep measurements you're taking with the subject's dream experience. Could be a good marketing angle for you, too. Dreams are cool.
In all seriousness, one of the sure-fire tests whether impotence is caused by physical (very rare) or psychological (quite common) reasons is to tie a thin string around your penis before sleep. If you wake up and the string is broken, it's a psychological problem, because every man experiences unconscious tumescence several times a night. "Morning wood" is just when you happened to wake up during one of those cycles. :)
It isn't just "peptides" and "circadian rhythms". Sleep is about much more than just being unconscious, which why sleeping pills don't solve the problem of sleep, they solve the problem of consciousness.
Sleep is what your brain and body do during the time you are asleep. Just because you're unconscious, doesn't mean you are getting good sleep.
At my company SoundMind we're identifying bursts of brain activity in your deepest sleep called Slow-Wave Oscillations (SWOs). When we detect an SWO, we have a short window in which to stimulate your brain, which causes your SWOs to increase in both power, and the number of slow waves. This results in up to 40% improvement in the performance of deep sleep. This is an improvement to the most important part of sleep, which is why we're starting here. SWOs are responsible for the clearing of Amyloid plaques, memory consolidation, and regulation of hormones such as GH, cortisol, insulin, and prolactin.
If you want to find out more, check us out at https://soundmind.co