The Zeo Personal Sleep Coach uses a headband to measure brain activity and record how you slept.
Having a machine watch you while you sleep may seem a bit creepy, but it might be the best way to help you get the Zzzz you need. Massachusetts based Zeo, Inc is selling a system that monitors brain activity while you rest and then gives you detailed information about how the night went for you. The Zeo Personal Sleep Coach uses a headband (measuring brain activity through skin surface electrical signals) and a bedside monitor that looks like an alarm clock to track how long you spent in REM, light, and deep sleep. The system allows you to critique your sleep habits and even gives you a score (called your “ZQ”) rating how you slept. Zeo PSG comes with online analytical tools to help you further decide the best way to improve your rest. Best of all, the Zeo bedside monitor can wake you up at the time that coincides with your natural cycle, hopefully avoiding that groggy morning feeling. Price tag starts at $250, with extra online coaching available at $8 per month (or $80/year or $100 lifetime service). It’s a pretty neat device, and another example of how continuous health monitoring will improve the way we live in the future. Check out the promotional video from Zeo below.
Health monitoring has started to come into its own in recent years. Toumaz Technologies and WIN both have wearable vital sign monitoring devices that transmit information wirelessly. GE is even developing a portable ultrasound machine the size of a mobile phone. These tools will allow individuals to personally track their own health 24/7/365. That information feed will help us detect serious illnesses before they happen as well as fine tune our bodies day to day.
The Zeo PSG is unique among these devices by focusing on our sleep. Of course, I’m pretty sure most of us already know when we haven’t gotten a good night’s rest, and I’m not sure the sleep journals, ZQ scores, and guided coaching it offers can actually improve your sleep once you realize how bad it is. Still, the more information you have at your disposal the more likely you will be to pinpoint those things you can change to help you snooze better.
Right now the Zeo bedside display will just wake you up when you're least groggy. What if it could perform other cool functions to improve your sleep?
The most promising feature I can see in this system is the SmartWake application – the program that improves upon a traditional clock alarm by waking you up when you’re out of deep sleep. I’d like to see more technology like this. Maybe a system that generates white noise when it detects ambient sounds that might make you lose deep sleep. Or a program that plays interesting sounds and lights while you’re in REM to affect your dreams.
No matter how Zeo improves upon its system, it’s going to serve as another data feed we can use to guide our health habits. Hopefully the future will see all these different health monitoring devices combined into one super monitor that tracks all the pertinent medical data at once. That sort of diagnostic tool will help convert our bodies from mysteries into free floating sources of digital information. When that happens, expect doctors (or implants, or computer programs) to guide your health in real time. Yep, with all this data to analyze the future’s going to be awful busy. Better make sure to get some sleep.
*You can find more Zeo promotional videos, and testimonials on the Zeo YouTube Channel.
[image and video credit: Zeo]
[Sources: Zeo]
Comments
It looks great but it is not possible to wear such a device permanently on my head while sleeping.
Ti is practically very difficult
Hello! Excellent post, really helpful! I was looking into dreaming and lucid dreaming and found this ebook called vivid dreaming – I downloaded it and it was pretty good stuff! I suggest you take a look if you’re into lucid dreaming (click my name or go here: http://ebookdl.net/vivid_dreams) – btw I will boukmark this blog, you’re doing a grand job! Awaiting more of your posts!
Hello! Excellent post, really helpful! I was looking into dreaming and lucid dreaming and found this ebook called vivid dreaming – I downloaded it and it was pretty good stuff! I suggest you take a look if you’re into lucid dreaming (click my name or go here: http://ebookdl.net/vivid_dreams) – btw I will boukmark this blog, you’re doing a grand job! Awaiting more of your posts!
Hello! Excellent post, really helpful! I was looking into dreaming and lucid dreaming and found this ebook called vivid dreaming – I downloaded it and it was pretty good stuff! I suggest you take a look if you’re into lucid dreaming (click my name or go here: http://ebookdl.net/vivid_dreams) – btw I will boukmark this blog, you’re doing a grand job! Awaiting more of your posts!
The first things I thought about was also help to induce lucid dreaming .
I actually bought the device mention by SixSided that is supposed to flash light when is detect rapid eyes movement, but it doesn't work well at detecting REM.
But that device should work well, it could send small sound to just inform you that your dreaming without waking you up.
Hi Shaun –
Safety is a top priority for us and I wanted to reply to your comment. Please forgive the length…
The entire product, including the headband, has been laboratory tested and complies with all standards for digital and wireless devices. More specifically, Zeo meets or exceeds US and international standards for safety including the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the European Commission (which oversees the CE mark) and the Canadian Standards Association (CSA).
In order to meet these standards, Zeo was required to undergo a standard test for the human body’s absorption of radio waves emitted by the headband. The emission level was and is so low that the test was not able to be applied (in fact it is twenty-five times lower than the minimum level for the test). To put it another way, the Zeo Headband emits one one-thousandth the radio wave energy of a common cell phone.
If you like knowing the details, the headband transmits at 24Hz on a 2.4GHz frequency band, with a max power output slightly over 1 milliwatt. This is similar to most household appliances and wireless networks.
Let me know if you have any other questions about Zeo…
Regards,
Derek@Zeo
[[email protected]]
Dream advertising space… now this sounds like an interesting market. But on the topic of guided lucid dreaming, I remember years and years ago on a show called “Beyond 2000″ seeing a sleeping eye mask that would detect when you entered REM sleep and would flash red LEDs briefly on your closed eyelids. No idea if they actually worked, but the idea seemed awesome at the time.
Im slightly uncomfortable with the idea of a wireless device constantly strapped to my head. Seems like unneccessary RF exposure directly into your frontal lopes.
Seems to me that devices like this will inevitably be integrated with guided lucid dreaming. So, for example, maybe Pepsico sponsors the device, and you get to use it for free. The compromise is that, while you're experiencing the best sleep of your life, you're dreaming about a Pepsi logo. Of course, if you want to pay for the premium version, you can turn the ads off. But if you do that, who knows what you'll dream about?