Scientifically Inspired

By using a personalized Sleep Diary that collects information when you set your alarm clock, you can easily understand your sleep and your unique biological patterns. This can be used to help you improve your behaviors and sleep health. Addionally, based on the idea of relaxation thereapy and stimulus control therapy, Proactive Sleep enables you to play music and sounds to soothe you to sleep at night. Lastly, you can help yourself to be alert in the morning by setting any song in your iTunes library as your alarm and by playing a stimulating game in order to turn off your alarm. This is based on findings that show that auditory, motor, and cognitive stimulation can help you to wake-up feeling refreshed more quickly.

By participating in Proactive Sleep you will also have the opportunity to get more features in future versions, which will be aimed at improving the quality and quantity of your sleep and making room for healthy and restful sleep in our busy lives.

Combating Insomnia

Insomnia is the most pervasive sleeping disorder, which has deleterious consequences to all that suffer from it. We address insomnia in two ways:

1) Based on the idea of cognitive behaviorial interventions, we provide you with feedback about healthy sleep and information on your own unique sleep patterns. We have an innovative way of displaying your personalized sleep stats by showing your daily behavior and your average behavior. This enables you to directly see how your sleep habits may change and how this affects you. The sleep diary provides you with information about your average amount of sleep, average number of awakenings, your score on the vigilance game, and the consistency of your sleep, which is whether you sleep the same amount of hours every night.

2) Ambient music or sounds can be equally as effective in combating insomnia as prescription medication, without the negative side-effects^[8]. This is an example of relaxation and stimulus control therapy. Stimulus control therapy is a widely known and validated therapy, which involves associating stimuli with sleep in order to trigger the behavior changes. Other examples of stimulus control therapy include using your bed only for sleep, getting out of bed as soon as you wake up in the morning, and following a consistent sleep schedule.

Combating Sleep Inertia

Sleep inertia is due to the brain decreasing its energy expenditure during sleep. Thus, anything that increases brain activity may decrease sleep inertia and make you feel more refreshed in the morning ^[1]. These scientific experiments have demonstrated that:

     • Waking up is a gradual process^[2].

     • The adverse effects of sleep inertia can be totally abolished by a moderately intense continuous noise^[3].

     • Countermeasures to sleep inertia include physical or mental exercise, external noise, bright light, and caffeine ^[4].

     • Bright light reduces sleep inertia after napping^[5].

     • Stimulating tasks (such as the Proactive Games) may promote alertness when sleep deprived^[6][7].

Future Direction of Assessing Sleep

Our goal is to continually do research in order to improve our product and to give you the best possible night of sleep. This includes trying to provide accurate feedback about how the factors that influence the sleep / wake cycle uniquely affect you and provide other proactive solutions to improve sleep and daily performance. This could mean adjusting sleep amount based on sleep need, waking-up in a lighter phase of sleep, developing behavioral programs to combat insomnia, and improving the proactive game by making it more stimulating.

In order to develop these features we must first have an accurate understanding of the three main factors that influence feeling refreshed in the morning and throughout the day. These factors incude:

1) The Homeostatic Component of sleep (ie. how sleep deprived you are)
2) The Circadian Component of sleep (ie. the time of day), and
3) Sleep Stages when awakened.

Different people are uniquely affected by these factors and how they affect you can change as your sleep habits change. While Proactive Sleep 1.0 provides you with information that is related to these factors, there is no direct behavioral feedback because this requires extensive testing. Specifically, this is difficult because all of these factors affect one another and other behaviors like exercise can influence them. So we leave it up to you if you want to try to optimize your sleep by viewing the Sleep Diary and understanding how these components of sleep impact your daily performance. For instance, using the Sleep Diary, you can try to figure out the best time to wake up, fall asleep, take a nap, etc. In future versions we hope to automate some of this functionality.

Thank you for participating in this important work and we wish you a restful sleep!