I'm amazed how many people I see taking photos of their coffee. Like "this is the one I want to remember". It's like the joy of novelty has been replaced by the potential and short-lived dopamine of a social like.
We wrote about the "why" on our blog a few months ago [1], but the short version
Sleep is a complex interplay of multiple systems within the body. A consistent/regular schedule means the brain/body is not guessing what you are asking of it. It knows when to reduce cortisol, drop body temperature, etc. etc.
A simple example:
When you force yourself to stay awake longer, your body attempts to compensate by increasing cortisol, then when you try to go to bed later, it can't just switch off the cortisol. It needs to clear it in your system. Then the next domino falls of when does your brain/body expect you to wake up? What are you asking of it?
Based on the current status of my shadowbanned account (I suspect a competitor in our space retaliating), it looks like `banall` only flags posts from the last 6 years.
Of course, nobody can view my profile anymore anyway (I'm waiting on appeal), but on my account, only posts from the last 6 years have the "Sorry this post was removed by reddit filters" message.
The same thing has been said about robotics, AI, space travel, etc. etc.
I'm not saying this is the way, and I have significant questions of understanding thought based on reading brain activity, but I wouldn't put down the entire ultrasound field.
Aren't most of the health benefits they list in the article the benefits (or reversing the impacts) of a healthier metabolic system? Apnea, fatty liver, and cancer risk are all linked to obesity.
I know there are other positive side-effects of GLP-1s, but those are not necessarily beneficial to most people. For example, much of the side-benefits are things like reduced addiction, smoking, drugs, alcohol. If you don't have an addiction, do you need addiction medication?
My personal belief's get in the way here as I think the methods we use to define dosage of pharmaceuticals and therapeutics is antiquated. We essentially titrate to the point where we see negative side-effects and then back off.
So before we can go to the "should everyone be taking GLP-1s", I think we need to be looking at "how much would benefit this person at this exact moment". The answer may be zero.
Is anyone actively working on this? (not just for GLP-1s).
I work in neurotech developing closed-loop neurostimulations, we only stimulate what we can measure and when we are looking for a specific response from that individual. I believe this is the future of medicine beyond just neurostimulation.
What many people may not realize is that loneliness is a significant contributor to some of these scams.
The fraudsters seek out people who just want to talk and be heard, who don't have someone else to call on.
It is somewhat surprising to me that banks don't implement a multi-signature account types for people at risk. Particularly for any transfers to new accounts or even purchases.
I've used react native a bunch. When you've got custom elements it isn't always the cross-platform write once you think it is. I've always had custom components across iOS and Android.
The big complaint is that the amount of work to get the level of polish needed in premium apps just isn't there. Or you need to do a bunch more work and it isn't significantly different than the amount of work of getting a native iOS and native android dev.
After reviewing a bunch of packages, one of our devs decided this was probably the best available. I'll mention the new Nordic, as we are based on nrf chips.
So creatine adds the phosphates back to the adenosine? However, it's a good reason to exercise. Burn the phosphates from ATP and be left with adenosine, which as you say promotes sleep.
However, I don't think it is so much of a signal of your brain having an idea of how long you've been awake, that's the circadian cycle. I always looked at adenosine as a driver of sleep need. If you burned this much ATP, we're going to need to recover. Seems like an elegant process.
So a bit different from the other comments. We're a wearable company which of course pairs with an app.
We built iOS first because that's what most of our users have, though the team is mostly on Android.
We built our logic in Rust, so that compiles cross platform. It's really just the UI layer that is per platform.
Though I had initially written our first demo in React-Native, the team wanted to go with native UI.
Lately we've been talking about moving the timeline for our Android app up because we can get AI to help using the iOS app as a foundation.
I haven't seen anything really new and compelling in iOS/Android land. The promise of right once run anywhere continues to be a promise, and the bluetooth libraries across different devices (particularly in Android land) has me concerned.
An upstream metric that can be measured daily is sleep slow-wave activity or delta power.
This is the synchronous firing of neurons which define restorative deep sleep, and one of the primary patterns which we describe as the Neural Function of Sleep.
This Neural Function of Sleep naturally declines with age, but more importantly, through stimulation we can enhance it which research is showing improves immune function, increases HRV, and more.
So while the original post discusses markers they expect to measure every 3 months, our work at https://affectablesleep.com measures the Neural Function of Sleep daily, but not to give you a score, but to actively support how well the brain sleeps, not how long.
Though there are over 50 published peer-reviewed papers in these techniques, I'm curious to see if we begin stimulation in our 30s, prior to the decline in sleep, do we slow the rate of decline as we age, as well as supporting daily function.
We have have iPhone dev phones, I just mean that for our daily use we don't use iOS. When I'm travelling I use iOS as my 2nd phone as well. So we dogfood it, but it's more like a snack specifically just for our app.
The structure of the app is in rust, so that is shared across platforms. The challenge is in the UI elements, and the cross platform stuff just isn't as good as going native there. You end up building a bunch of custom components anyway.
I'm also a bit wary of BLE on Android. iOS, is a bit more of a known entity.
It isn't just iOS and Android either. Because we support researchers, we also have a web app that they use. It surprising how large our technology footprint is across services, firmware, web, and apps.
I have a brand new Microsoft Band still in the box! When I ordered one, Microsoft sent me two and refused to refund me and take the 2nd one back :) I still look at that device fondly.
What makes you think an EEG headband is not just a smartwatch in a different form-factor? We're running an nrf53 plus extra storage. We don't have a screen, but screens are fairly inexpensive. We've got a full EEG system.
We have actually done pretty well at limiting the number of parts. The headband is so thin it's buttonless. We didn't have room for a button and created a fully buttonless interface.
There are parts you wouldn't think would be expensive but are. Bone-conduction transducer, heart-rate sensor, etc etc. Yes, we could ditch the HR and save some money but we feel it will be beneficial.
Watches are a thing that exists. EEG sleep headbands aren't. We had to create our own materials for EEG sensing. Everything else on the market have limited life and aren't comfortable enough for sleeping.
Of course, all the plastics and TPU are custom. The fabrics are custom. Our scale is also very small right now, so I fully expect the cost to come down significantly with scale.
Yeah, my co-founder and I were discussing this yesterday.
It was always in the plans, we're all actually on Android, but we wanted to get the user experience right on one platform and not spread ourselves too thin, but we're thinking AI makes a big difference here, so... no announcement yet, but it was never going to be iPhone forever.
I still can't say for sure we'll have android at launch, but we'd like to.
We decided to go with a low device cost and subscription to make it cost effective to purchase when finances allow us to get to a monthly instead of yearly subscription.
I think it should. Our system is closed-loop and we monitor the real-time change in brain-wave activity. The process is very precise, and must be (80ms window for a 50ms pulse).
When we first started, many in the sleep community were against using these techniques. A significant number of the studies look specifically at safety, and often people report to these as "null results" when in fact what was being examined was the potential negative impact.
One example is the study on metabolic function [1], which showed no result in healthy men. It did not harm their metabolic function, though it also didn't improve it (though I'm not sure how you would measure improvement in healthy metabolic function).
For our company, there are many modalities and capabilities we are building for the future, we began with auditory stimulation and this one in particular due to the low-risk and volume of research.
Fair criticisms.
However, there are FDA limitations on what you can say regarding devices that both measure and affect biomarkers and neuromarkers while the user is unconscious.
This is why we describe the neural function of sleep, but can't specifically get into details regarding increases in slow-wave activity, 15% decrease in early night cortisol, 14.5% increase in HRV, etc etc. We can link to the research, but can't say "this is what we do".
We are relying on user testimonials, which we are gathering through our beta testing and beyond.
At the same time, we do describe the "clearer thinking", "immune function", "stress" etc about half way down the page.
I think they will soon be re-writing this article with the addition of "and rise again".
I work in neurotech/sleeptech and one of the biggest challenges I see in our industry is, if not pure snake-oil, the over-hype of "backed by research".
People have accused us of being snake-oil as well, and I get why they might think that if you haven't read or don't understand the science.
I've seen products that claim to be Vagus Nerve stimulators that are worn on the wrist, nowhere near the vagus nerve. Products that claim to mimic the "magnetic frequency of hormones".
We've also got the current "It's got electrolytes" craze which is kinda crazy that we've truly replicated idiocracy.
For those curious, I'm the co-founder of affectablesleep.com