Top Story, Devices & Diagnostics

The bedside SleepCogni device: An insomniac’s new best friend?

Dependence on sleeping pills is a problem for many people, but other therapies aren't always very successful. The designer of SleepCogni believes his device is the answer to not just monitoring sleep, but actually inducing it.

Over 75 million prescriptions for sleep disorders reportedly were written in the U.S. and the U.K. alone in 2014, which is an average growth of 23 percent on the previous year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated that sleep deprivation is now a global health epidemic.

Medical device inventor Richard Mills personally suffered from insomnia for years. After only minor improvements following cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and an addiction to sleeping pills, he took his experience and used it to create the SleepCogni device.

Although there are many other devices on the market that will monitor movement and sleep behavior, Mills, according to a company statement, says he really needed help turning his mind off and falling asleep. SleepCogni, which is supported by Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K., reportedly integrates cognitive science and CBT, stimulus control and physiological measures.

In addition to day-to-day stress, a major contributor to difficult sleeping comes from our before-bed exposure to unnatural blue light emitted by screens and various devices, which suppresses melatonin and disturbs our biological clock, thus delaying our natural cues to sleep.

SleepCogni desensitizes a user through a mathematical sequence of patterns using the opposite wavelengths in sound and light that normally stimulate you. By monitoring heart rate, body movement and temperature, the device programs audio, visual and tactile cues.

“I have been waiting for someone to come to me with something tangible that patients could use themselves to treat their insomnia,” said Dr. Irshaad Ebrahim, founder of the London Sleep Centre. “SleepCogni is an integrated piece of scientifically validated research based treatment for insomnia. With devices like SleepCogni I see a trend to provide the patient with the tools to treat their own insomnia rather than relying on seeing professionals and leaving only the more serious insomnia to be treated one-to-one.”

The timing aspect of the SleepCogni serves to regulate sleep in a new way that will help to avoid the grogginess that comes from waking up from an alarm clock at various cycles of sleep that aren’t ideal, as well as the grogginess that comes from oversleeping on our days off.

The ultimate goal for SleepCogni is to reduce the dependence on sleep medications and figure out how to get a person’s body adjusted to a more healthy, restorative sleep cycle.

A Kickstarter campaign has been established for the device with a goal of $105,356 within the next 28 days.

This tutorial does a good job of showing how it works:

Photo: Screengrab via SleepCogni.com

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