Sleepy Time Tech

But first, let's talk about the science of sleep for a bit, because the tech that is in that sleep industry is all supposed to tap into the science of sleep in some way or another. So let's get an understanding of that first. Now, the average human spends between one four to one third of their life asleep. If you're TORII, adds closer to fifty fifty. So at the end of your life, you could divide your age by

three and that's how many years you spent snoozing. More or less you lay about No, but really, sleep is is really important. Until the mid twenty century, the general thinking around sleep was that it was just a time of rest when your body and your brain kind of went into hibernation mode and laid dormant, but in actuality, your brain is pretty active when you're sleeping. In fact, it can be so active that it can look almost

identical to an awake brain. It's engaged in activities that are necessary to life, and according to Dr Mark Wu, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins, those activities are also very closely connected to quality of life, so not just making life go on, but making the life you have worth living. Sleep consists of multiple stages in a cycle that repeats several times per night. The first half for first section of that cycle would fall into the category of non R E M sleep or non RIM sleep. That itself

has four stages. So in the first stage, the body is between being awake and asleep. This is the stage you are in when you're first going to sleep. It's also the stage you end up in when you're waking up, typically unless you've been awakened out of the middle of your sleep by something else. In the second stage, you are in a light sleep, and at that stage your heart rate and your breathing regulate and your body temperature

begins to drop. The third and fourth stages are deeper sleep, and we now think it's these stages where the brain experiences the restorative benefit of sleep. This is important for the formation of memories, it's important for learning. It helps you incorporate the stuff that you've experienced into long term memories, and it prepares your brain for the next day so that when you encounter new information, you can incorporate that

as well. Next comes R. E. M. And I do not mean the band from Athens, Georgia, although they are great. You know, they're a bunch of shiny, happy people. But instead I'm talking about rapid eye movement. Now, in that stage of sleep, the eyes are moving quickly behind closed lids. Brain activity is similar to what you would experience when you're awake. This is when you can have intense, emotionally

charged dreams. Some sleep experts have observed brain activity and rem sleep that have exceeded the brain activity of an awake person. So it's also in this stage when you could experience a phenomenon called sleep paralysis. Now we don't know a whole lot about this experience other than it can be absolutely unnerving. I've actually experienced this in the past, although not recently, a lot of people have had bouts of sleep paralysis, and it can really scare you when

it happens. So, Uh, here's typically what's going on in an episode of sleep paralysis. Your brain is aware of your surroundings, but your body does not respond to your desire to move, So you feel like you're awake, like a d percent awake, except that you cannot move at all. So this is very unnerving to say the least. It also can be accompanied by hallucinations of both a visual

and an auditory nature. And in fact, there's a lot of folklore and a lot of urban legends that are based around this phenomena as people have experienced this and tried to make sense of it in some way. Uh. The mythology behind the succubus is often linked to sleep paralysis. There's another one called night hag syndrome, where people have said they've imagined a figure of a of a menacing woman sometimes perched on their chest, preventing them from being

able to move. There are others who have interpreted this as being visited by aliens, like there were these mysterious alien like figures gathered around their bed and they were unable to move. They all seem real and it is genuinely scary to not be able to move. But from what we can tell, this is all based on an actual natural phenomenon that happens sometimes when you are aware during an R E M stage of sleep, but you are not unable to move. There's no supernatural cause for that.

It's something that just occasionally happens for some people that happens more frequently than others. Sometimes it happens during times of great stress and anxiety, and other times you might not have these problems at all. But why would you be paralyzed in the first place, Why would you be unable to move? Well? When you go into R E M sleep, your body essentially has the sort of shut

off switch for uh, your your conscious movement. It's probably so that we don't hurt ourselves by thrashing around violently in response to those vivid, emotionally charged dreams that I mentioned that we experienced during R E M sleep. So it's our body's way of protecting itself during that part of the sleep cycle. Without it, we would be falling on a bed or punching the person next to us

or whatever. It's not. You know, it's not meant to be harmful, but it is not a great experience if we happen to be aware of our surroundings, it's supposed to be, you know, taking effect only when we are unconscious and we're not aware of things. So when you are aware of everything but you're unable to move, it's

pretty creepy. By the way, I've heard. One way of trying to deal with this is concentrate on making very small movements with a part of your body, like your toes, and that this can gradually get you out of the the stage of sleep so that you are fully awake and you don't have that experience anymore. If nothing else, you can take your focus off of the hallucinations you might otherwise be experiencing. So on a typical night, you'll actually cycle through those various stages up to four or

five times. But also with each cycle, you spend a little less time in stages three and four of the non r EM sleep, and you spend more time in REM sleep. Now, previously scientists thought that REM sleep was the stage that was really important, that was restorative, that would give you that lovely feeling of being rested when you wake up. These days, scholarship suggests that's really those third and fourth stages of non rem sleep that are

the most important. So kind of like how food science keeps changing, sleep science keeps changing too, where we think we know what's going on, and then as we learn more we realize, well, that might not actually be true. Maybe this other thing is true. There are two main drivers for sleep biological drivers. The first is what we call circadian rhythms. These are controlled by what amounts to a biological clock in the brain. The clock does not

just keep time. I mean it does keep time. You can separate people from external stimuli and they will fall into a natural circadian rhythm. Typically it's a little bit longer than twenty four hours that rhythm, so you will gradually get off the day night cycle that everyone else is on if you are again sequestered from everybody else.

But it reacts to external stimuli like light cueues. So when it gets darker, the brain starts to trigger the production of a hormone called melatonin, and when the brain senses light, it's begins to to pull back on melatonin production. So this is one of the reasons you hear people say you should limit the light sources that are in your sleeping area so that you can help trigger this production of melatonin. It's one of the reasons why I

use a sleep mass actually. Now, as for what melatonin actually does for humans, well, it's not completely understood, but it might help synchronize circadian rhythms in different parts of the body. As this hormone travels throughout the body, it's produced by the brain, but then it travels to all of our organs and it interacts with tissues that have melatonin receptors. Melotonin receptors are special proteins that some tissues have.

Melatonin probably contributes to initiating and maintaining sleep, and also helping our bodies maintain the rhythms necessary for typical activities during the day and night cycles. So, in other words, making sure everything is ready for action in the daytime and ready for rest at night. And it's not essential for human sleep, but we tend to sleep better during the times that melatonin is being chugged out by our brains. So you can sleep during the day and be awake

at night, it's just not as easy to do. The second thing to regulate sleep is called the sleep drive. Our bodies require sleep, Our bodies crave sleep throughout the day. Our desire for sleep increases, and when it reaches a certain level, we gots to sleep or we start suffering some pretty nasty drawbacks. Sleep and hunger are in many ways similar to one another because our body also increases

in hunger and we want to eat. However, our body goes an extra step when it comes to sleep, because no matter how hungry you are, your body doesn't make you eat. You make yourself eat, but your body doesn't force you to eat. However, if you're super sleepy, your body can totally make you go to sleep without you choosing for that to happen. Even if you don't want to go to sleep at that moment, maybe you're doing

something important like driving a car. If you're tired enough, your body might force you to go through what are called micro sleep sessions. During those moments, you'll sleep for a couple of seconds at a time, even with your eyes open, so you kind of zone out for those couple of seconds, which can again be really dangerous depending on what you're doing. Also, you might want to take naps.

If you want to take naps, that's fine, just try to limit your naps to less than half an hour, especially if it's later in the day because otherwise that can throw off your sleep drive and make it harder for you to get to sleep at night. So typically you want to keep your naps to twenty to thirty minutes, especially later in the day. Sleep helps our brains deal with input. It promotes what is called brain plasticity. When you're low on sleep, you're gonna have problems learning stuff,

remembering things. You're gonna have that foggy feeling. Sleep also is important for other systems not just our brains, like our immune systems and our metabolism, So you want to get good, regular sleep for good health. In general, the sleep requirements are not set in stone for everyone. It's not exactly like you can't just say everybody needs seven

and a half hours or eight hours of sleep. It varies from person to person at least a little bit, but generally speaking, healthy adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night if they want to be at their best. Kids and teenagers need more sleep than adults do, and the older we get in general, the less sleep we tend to need. But even senior citizens would really only be at their best if they got

at least seven hours of sleep per night. So we've got an activity that takes up a third of our lives, and it's important to engage in this activity in order for us to maintain a healthy lifestyle. We need sleep to be able to function in general. So it should come as no surprise that there are tons of products out there that target sleep, because it's a no brainer.

Everybody needs it. So if you can make a product that seems to help people do that activity or do that activity more efficiently, then you stand to make a lot of money because everybody's got to do it, and maybe your product actually helps people. That would be the ideal situation, of course, that the thing you're selling actually does have a positive effect. But some of you may

already be way ahead of me here. If there's still a lot we do not know or understand about sleep, it's probably challenging to create products that will work for a wide variety of people in a way that legitimately helps you sleep. That is in fact the case, or appears to be. That's not to say every sleep product out there is bunk, but it's good to turn on those critical thinking skills when we start looking at sleep technology.

I'll explain more in a second, but First, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor, Dafne la Prince Ringett. And I know I'm mispronouncing your name, and I do apologize. But Dafne wrote a great piece and Wired recently in September two. It's titled sleep Tech is Booming, but It's getting weirder and dodgier, and I recommend you check out that article and it Daphne quotes Lloyd Price, who is a co founder of a company called Zesti. Price said, the industry as a whole is now in what we

call the plateau of productivity within the sleep tech hype cycle. Now, the hype cycle is a concept from research firm Gardner, and it describes the life cycle of a technology, not just sleep tech, but every technology as it goes from the initial concept all the way up to widespread mainstream adoption, assuming it makes it that far. The typical chart for the hype cycle looks like a really big hill on a roller coaster ride that then goes into a deep

dip and then a gradual climb afterward. And it involves things like your expectation and your adoption levels. So it all starts the innovation trigger or the technological breakthrough that gets things started. This would be the initial announcement of something really cool and groundbreaking. At this stage, there may not be anything that a consumer can get their hands on. It may all be in the prototype or conceptual stage, and people start hearing about and they get interested in it.

That leads into the peak of inflated expectations. This is the high point on that roller coaster hill that I was talking about. It's typically a pretty sharp, steep hill, and this is where publicity gets people really really excited for this technology. Everyone is at a fever pitch. They

think this technology has the potential to change everything. There may not be an actual product out there, or maybe there's only a very limited number and they can only be adopted by like bleeding edge technology fans who have a lot of in home that they can use to buy this kind of stuff. But typically it doesn't it's not widely available enough for for the average person to get experience with it. Next, after the peak of inflated

expectations comes the trough of disillusionment. This is that dip I was talking about, a low point in the life cycle. This happens when people realize that the thing they got the actual product they were able to buy doesn't meet those high expectations they had. Now, high expectations can come from multiple sources. They can come from pr folks who

are really promoting the heck out of a technology. So it could be a misrepresentation of the tech, or it could be a misinterpretation on the part of the consumer. It's not necessarily the fault of publicists, although they do tend to really tout the the positives of technology. I mean, their job is to sell stuff. So I'm reminded of virtual reality, both when it had its initial run in the ninety nineties and the more recent attempts with stuff

like the Oculus and the Vive products. Those products are still around, but I say that they failed to deliver upon some of the unrealistic expectations that we had built up around them, and as a result, they had to go through this trough period, the trough of disillusionment. Next would be the slope of enlightenment. That's when we start to see implementations of this technology that actually makes sense

and they have real value. They may not remotely come close to meeting the incredible expectations we had had previously, but they show how the technology can be used in a real practical value added way. Then we finally get to the plateau of productivity. That's when we get into mainstream adoption of that technology. It becomes a practical part of other technologies. Sometimes sometimes it just becomes a feature on an existing product as opposed to a standalone thing,

and that is where sleep technology is now. According to Lloyd Price. Then again, he co founded a health company that has an interest in sleep technology, so it probably would be good news to such a company that we have moved into this widespread mainstream adoption. It's hard to argue, though, because sleep tech has found its way into lots of different products. Many of the early examples of sleep tech, many of the ones that are still around now, are

subsets of a trend called the quantified self. This was the trend that spawned all sorts of stuff like activity trackers, sleep trackers, technology that would give you data on a day to day basis about your activities. It's all about, uh,

giving you data about your everyday life. The quantified self started off as a movement back in two thousand seven, and it was it was more or less founded by a couple of guys named Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, both of whom worked for Wired magazine, who really championed

this concept. And it's all about using technology to track our personal activities, are day to day behaviors, and then give us data about that so that we can, prefer ideally use it in some way that benefits us, right that we can get a better understanding of who we are and what we do, and maybe fine tune our

behavior so that we're living our best lives. The quantified self can involve using technology to gather information all by itself, such as a pedometer, like we just wear the pardometer and it counts the steps and it might send that data somewhere. Or it can also include technology that requires some sort of additional human input, like a calorie tracking app that would tell you how many calories you've consumed

versus burned in a day. But in order to do that, you have to actually tell the app what you ate, so it can estimate the number of calories you've consumed, and maybe it consults some other sensors like a pedometer to estimate how many calories you have burned, and then it can give you the full information afterward. Sleep trackers fall into this category of the quantified self technology. These are devices they're supposed to monitor your sleep patterns and

send that data to you in some useful way. So how do sleep trackers work well, It kind of depends on the technology. There are a few different approaches, but the first level of sleep tracking depends heavily on accelerometers that obviously measures acceleration. This method of assessing sleep predates activity trackers and sleep trackers. It's called actography, and there are specialized pieces of equipment called actographs, and they they

typically look like a watch. You would wear an actograph on the risk of your non dominant hand in your typical sleep study. The actograph can register and record movements. So it's essentially the same thing as activity trackers and fitbit trackers. But it's been around for a long time and it was largely just the domain of medical establishment,

not not something you would go out and buy. The data that would be gathered from these sleep sessions would be analyzed to estimate sleep parameters and tell the sleep specialists how well or poorly you slept in a given night. And sleep specialists have been using act graphs for several years and it's one of the preferred methods for measuring sleep activity because it allows the user to sleep in their own preferred space, like their own bed, rather than

having to try and sleep in a lab setting. It is not the most accurate method of measuring sleep activity, but it's less invasive than the more accurate approaches. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, actography has been well validated for the estimation of nighttime sleep parameters across age groups, but the validity of the estimation of sleep

on set latency and daytime sleeping is limited. Clinical guidelines and research suggests that risk actography is particularly useful in the documentation of sleep patterns prior to a multiple sleep latency test, in the evaluation of circadian rhythm sleep disorders to evaluate treatment outcomes, and as an adjunct to home monitoring of sleep disordered Breathing actography has also been well studied in the evaluation of sleep in the context of

depression and dementia. Now, it is important to remember that this is within the context of sleep specialists working with patients. The trackers we tend to rely upon today may give us information about our sleep activity, but it's not a substitute for a medical professional if there's something wrong going on, but it might be a way to alert us that there's something we should have checked out. Also, the more disrupted your sleep is, the more accurate actography can be

in telling you what is actually going on. Now, there's another side to sleep trackers that is also problematic, and that's anxiety some people feel when they're trying to beat their high score. As it were. So you typically get your sleep feedback data fed to you in some way that's related to a grade, and people like getting good grades and they hate getting bad grades, and they start seeing that they have mediocre grades and they think, well, I want to get that score up. That competitive nature

starts to come through. But this actually can start to create anxiety and stress. You're stressing out about getting a better grade in sleep. There's actually a name for this. It is orthosomnia. Now, literally that word would mean correct sleep, but it's being used to describe people who have an unhealthy fixation on achieving that perfect night's sleep to beat

last night's score. Oh, it's so important to me. And then ironically that can actually prevent you from getting even a good night's sleep, let alone the perfect night's sleep, And perhaps the more ironic thing is that these users could be worried about data that isn't even accurately reflecting their sleep to begin with. They could be looking at a grade and thinking I can do better than that, without knowing that they already have done better than that.

Fitness trackers that claim to tell you how long you spent during each stage of sleep in that cycle I was talking about earlier are not really reliable because they measure movement, but sleep cycles don't depend on movements so much as they depend upon brain activity, so fitness trackers are literally not measuring the activity that's actually linked to the various stages in the sleep cycle. There measuring movement,

not brain activity. Fitness trackers tend to give you are a pretty high margin of error when it comes to tracking how much time you actually spent sleeping, not to mention the quality of the sleep, so you can't even really trust most sleep trackers to give you an accurate reading of how long you slept, let alone how well you did it, so you could be obsessing over a

grade that isn't reflecting reality in the first place. Now these days, sleep trackers are finding their way into lots of other products, including pads that are supposed to slip under your mattress or special pillows that monitor the movement of your head throughout the night. But they all pretty much tracked the same thing. They're all tracking movement. Some of them do have nifty features that let you tie

together the sleeptracker with automated systems in your home. So let's say it's the morning and you're starting to move around, and it's indicating that, hey, this guy has probably woken up because he's moving around a lot, and so it starts to send commands to other automated systems and turns the lights on or opens up the blinds, or just

the thermostat, or start your coffee maker. But it seems to me those products are still making promises about giving you detailed information on your sleep cycles that might not be totally realistic. When we come back, we'll look at some devices that are marketed as sleep trackers that don't even require you to wear a device on your body. So how do they track your sleep? You'll have to listen carefully, But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So there are a couple of newer

products that have hit the market. I'm not going to name them, but there are a couple of different ones that hit the market recently that don't require contact in order to track your sleep. So what are they doing. They're actually using radio waves to monitor your sleep activity. And you might think, what the heck does that mean. Well, they rely upon essentially the same approach as radar, only they're using different radio frequencies at very very low power,

so it's there's nothing harmful going on. It's using radio frequencies at a power that's even lower than say, bluetooth. The devices, there are a couple of different ones out there.

We'll send radio signals. Those signals collide with objects in the space I eat you, and then the radio signals bounce back and go back to the device, which then picks up that information, and when you're moving, whether you're moving toward or away, it will actually quote unquote know that you are moving because of the nature of those radio signals. This is all due to the Doppler effect.

We've learned about this in tech stuff before. But what it means is that if you're moving toward the source of radio waves, so let's say you're tossing in your sleep and you turn and you're turning toward this device as it's sending radio waves to you, and you're moving towards those radio waves. When they bounce off you and go back to the device, they're a little compressed, they're a little closer together those those wavelengths. Then the so

the frequency has increased slightly because you moved closer. You moved toward the source of those radio waves. So when it picks it up the device, it says, oh, this joker's moving towards me. If you were moving away, then the radio waves would be a little elongated, to be a little longer than they were when they were sent out. So now the device is saying, oh, that's joker is moving away from me. Now this this guy needs some sleep. He's tossing all over the place, might be re enacting

WrestleMania two thousand right there in bed sucker. So you then have some software that analyzes all this data, and then it presents that data in an app that sorts out your sleep supposedly by cycle. The devices are essentially tracking your breathing and your movements, so it can actually detect your breathing as well through the same process. So you could argue then away they're slightly more advanced than your basic actograph because acto graphs, the basic ones don't

take your breathing into account. They're just measuring your movement. But again, since your sleep cycle rely more on brain activity than on movement, it might not provide the most accurate data other than telling you what you might already know, which is that you had a rough night, you weren't able to settle down very easily. Chances are you know that already. Well, maybe that's not a problem. Maybe you just want to know in general how well you're sleeping.

You might get a good enough idea about that from these various trackers. But then again, like I said, if you're not sleeping well, you probably already know it just because you feel tired, you feel a little foggy. You probably have other indications already that you weren't sleeping well, So you don't necessarily need a device to say, hey, by the way, you didn't sleep well last night because you feel it. So your mileage may vary with the

utility of these devices. But what about technology that's meant to help you go to sleep, not just track your sleep, but lull you into sleep. Well, again, I would recommend keeping your s teptical hat on when you look at this technology that's meant to help people get to sleep. It's not to say that companies or inventors that are creating this technology are specifically trying to trick you or

scam you. They may be sincere in their efforts, but many of those inventions are coming from people who they come up with a cool idea. They come up with a way of making that idea reality, creating a gadget that actually works based upon that idea. But they aren't usually sleep experts. So while they're making something that quote unquote works the way they intended, it doesn't necessarily work

in cooperation with human physiology. So their gadget may do what it was supposed to do on a technical level, but it may not be actually useful in a practical level. So let's talk about some of these things. Um, and again, I am not a sleep expert. I cannot say definitively whether these devices work or don't work. I'm just saying incorporate some critical thinking. So at c the company Phillips introduced a thing I guess you could call it a headband.

It looks really funky. It's called the smart sleep and that's all one word, smart sleep. You'd wear it, and it's supposed to monitor your brain activity during sleep. Now, since that's the real indicator for which sleep cycles you're passing through it in any given time, that a part at least is right on track, right, you want to measure brain waves more than movement or breathing because it's going to tell you more accurately how much time you spent in each stage of the sleep cycle. However, I

don't know how accurately it can read brainwave activity. That's actually a little tricky. You know. If you're using an e G, you would typically use electrodes placed in specific spot along the scalp, and there are even versions of that that go beyond that. They require implanted electrodes. That's talking about surgery in that case too, surgically implant sensors. But there are lots of e G s that just

use the surface level sensors. These sensors have to be pretty sensitive to pick up brainwave activity because they have to detect it through the skull, and typically they can only detect the surface level activity, not anything deeper. Because again, you've got a pretty good insulator with that skull there.

So this consumer level device is supposed to monitor those brain waves and detect the various stages in the sleep cycle, and when you enter slow wave sleep, the device begins to play customized audio tones through special bone conduction speakers. Bone conduction means that the speakers are going to send vibrations of sound directly through your skull so that they travel to your inner ear without having to play through

the air, so that the sound travels through your ear canal. Ideally, that would mean that if you happen to sleep in the same room as other people, those other people are not going to hear those sleep tones going off in the middle of the night because it's going to be playing it directly against your skull. Does it work, I have no idea. I am skeptical. I tried to search for any clinical trial information about this, because it maybe it does work, but I couldn't find any actual clinical trials.

I did find a proposed study, so it sounds like it's one that has not yet actually happened. That proposed study comes from Phillips itself, and the description of it does not fill me with confidence. Honestly, the description of the study begins like this quote. This study is a non randomized, unblinded, uncontrolled case series clinical trial validating the smart Sleep product including sleep Mapper app in the home setting.

In the quote, so, the fact that it's non randomized, unblinded, and uncontrolled does not seem like it's a very scientifically rigorous approach. Those are all flags for me. I would much prefer I randomized, blinded and controlled test where you have a control group, you don't know each subject wouldn't know whether he or she is in the control group or the the actual test group. They would be randomly selected. All of that would be much better if you want

scientific rigor. However, when you realize the purpose of the study is really to legitimize a product that's already out on the market, you start to get the feeling that perhaps Phillips isn't super invested in making sure it has the scientific chops to back up the claims. But that's all guesswork on my part though. That's just the skeptic and cynic in me talking, So it doesn't necessarily mean the product doesn't work. I'm just skeptical, and I suggest

people use critical thinking. But hey, what about a sleep robot? Yeah, you're ready to hear this one. Tarry Tary is really excited about hearing about the sleep robot. So the sleep robot, you're probably already imagining some sort of you know, maybe like a like a robo Teddy Bear, or maybe it's maybe it's a robot that's fully sized, humanoid robot that

can you know, spoon you. But no, it kind of looks like a giant kidney bean made out of fabric, like a plush kidney bean that weighs about four pounds. They're supposed to hug it when you're going to sleep, so you do kind of spoon it. You lay on your side and you hug this this kidney bean like, you know, like we all want to when we go to bed at night. We're just like, God, I wish I had an enormous kidney bean I could cut all right. Now, Well now you can uh with this somnos sleep robot.

The robot. Some people argue it's being very generous to call it a robot has a speaker, and it has a smart card reader, so you can actually store music on a smart card and then insert the smart card into the robot and it will play back whatever music you've put in there. So if you want, you know, nice soothing classical music, or some very gentle electronic music, or maybe you want Andrew w. K telling you to

party in your sleep, you could do that. And it has a mechanism also inside of the thing that simulates breathing. So now you've got a breathing kidney bean clutched to your chest. Now, the idea is that you would hug this thing and you would slowly try to adjust your breathing so that your breathing rate would match the pattern that the device had set, and this would help you relax and bring on sleep. The device is supposed to shut off automatically, wants a de text that the user

has fallen asleep, so it doesn't work well. It's based off principles that have been studied by sleep specialists, including this method of controlling your breathing in order to become more relaxed. Next, there are a lot of meditation techniques out there that focus on breathing and it's a good way to prepare your body for sleep. But whether or

not this particular device works, I don't know. It is at least based on those principles, however, so UH, you might find a device helpful in making sure you're breathing properly, that you're guiding your breathing to match the pattern that this thing sets, but typically you could do that by

yourself if you really wanted to UM. It requires a lot of focus and it may require a little practice to get to that, and you might even require listening to like a guided meditation track to help you set the right pace for your breathing to help relax and bring on sleep. But that could be significantly cheaper than spending fifty dollars on a robot kidney bean. So I haven't really covered technology that's meant to help with sleep disorders, such as a c PAP machine that's also known as

a continue with positive airway pressure machine. Those are used to help treat sleep apnea. So I'll have to do a full episode dedicated to that technology in the future.

Much of that technology has been through rigorous testing because this is technology that falls into the category of medical equipment, So most countries require that anything that's being marketed as a piece of medical equipment has to reach a certain standard of performance to prove that actually does what's supposed to do, that's medically beneficial, that uh, it has been tested thoroughly to make sure that it's safety use. Otherwise

it's illegal. The devices I mentioned in this episode really

aren't medical devices. They might make certain claims that kind of tread into the field of medicine a little bit, but they typically tend to be very very careful about that so that they don't make any outright medical claims because that would require them to also go through this whole rigorous testing procedure, which could ultimately result in one of these products being told or the company is being told, I'm sorry, but this doesn't meet the standards that we

have set. And then you have a company that has invested all this money in a product and it can't sell it. So it makes economic sense to not go down that pathway. However, it can be somewhat misleading, particularly if you are a fairly naive consumer. So again, use

that critical thinking. Sleep is very very important, and ultimately I would argue that if you find something that works for you, whether it is scientifically proven to be effective or not, ultimately doesn't matter if it works for you.

If you find that a sleeping robot actually does make you sleep better, or that by tracking your sleep you are getting better sleep night after night, then by all means you should do that just because thing may not have scientific evidence to back it as being broadly applicable. If it's working for you and you need that sleep, and we all know you need that sleep, then you

know as they do it. Also, I mean, I've done in a whole episode about a s m R. And while I don't really know if there's any truly scientific explanation for the a s m R phenomenon, I do find them incredibly relaxing and they do put me to sleep. So I use that all the time. I use it with my you know, critical thinking skills, but I still

enjoy them and they still put me to sleep. So maybe I'll do another episode about a s m R in the future and talk to another a s m R artist, because that was a lot of fun that last time. In the meantime, if you guys are still awake, you haven't used this podcast to lull yourselves into a deep sleep, why don't you contact me let me know what kind of topics I should cover in the future,

whether they are technologies, companies, personalities in tech. Maybe there's an interview that you would like me to do in the future, let me know. You can go to our website that is tech Stuff podcast dot com that has links to all the ways to contact us, like email and social media and all that kind of good stuff. Make sure you go to our our store that's at t public dot com slash tech Stuff. There you can pick up tech stuff merchandise, and maybe you want a

big T shirt to sleep in. I'd like that because every purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and bathands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com