Gadgets that can help you get a good night’s sleep
Robots you can hug. A ring fit for royalty. And a pebble that trains your brain...
SOME years ago I endured a bereavementinduced bout of insomnia. It was hellish. The more frantically I chased sleep, the more spitefully it eluded me. I was prescribed pills, a mixed blessing. I never felt rested.
After a fretful few months I finally quit the drugs, and as the rage of grief subsided, my mind quietened and sleep found me again.
I sleep fairly well now — though spinning thoughts occasionally ping me awake at 3am — but all of us are sleeping less. We are catching a mere six-and-a-half hours’ sleep a night on average, and a bleary-eyed 65% of us suffer from impaired sleep several nights a week. Which has certainly made a number of bright-eyed entrepreneurs wake up.
The sleep-health industry is estimated to be worth up to €34 billion and now has its first dedicated trade show, Somnex.
About 120 businesses filled a London exhibition space for it earlier this month, showcasing soporific herbal drinks, infrared light therapy, fancy mattresses and cuddly robots.
There were smart rings that track your sleep stages and advise you on bedtimes — as seen on Prince Harry’s finger last week; lamps that analyse sleep quality; devices that encourage the user to mimic the brain patterns of a good sleeper; brain-scanning headphones; snooze pods; pillow sprays; sleep bracelets — plus an impressive array of experts. So what are the best new ways to nod off?
THE BREATHING, CALMING ROBOT
THE Somnox Sleep Robot is a fat kidney bean-shaped cushion or ‘sleep companion’. When Jeroen Feron from Somnox places it in my arms, I exclaim, ‘It’s like a baby!’ It’s heavy and, unnervingly, contains a mechanism that makes it ‘breathe’. You cuddle it and it soothes you to sleep.
Jeroen explains: ‘It stimulates breathing regulation. You feel the falling and rising of the breath, and subconsciously adapt your breathing to that of the robot. It has, say, 15 breaths per minute, and it takes that down gradually, over an hour, to ten breaths. Your heart rate goes down as you focus on the robot, and you fall asleep faster.’
You can adapt the number of breaths to what suits, and the robot senses when you’ve fallen asleep and turns off. Via an app, it can also play guided meditations, audio books, symphonies or whatever you choose.
At first the idea of spooning a breathing robot feels peculiar, but is it much odder than hugging a teddy bear? Frankly, I find snuggling up to my husband disruptive to sleep, but if the (sleep robotsized) cat curls up beside me, I fling an arm around him and nod off in no time.
I feel this robot could be a fine husband/cat substitute. €549, available for pre-order at meetsomnox.com
THE SENSORY SPA SOLUTION
TO SLEEP well, your mind needs to relax. And the AquaVibe, a sound and light programme which involves lying on a waterbed and gazing at bright colours, pummels all five senses into chilling out. It’s a spa or clinicbased treatment designed by hypnotherapist and transformational mind coach Nigel Hutchings.
The theory behind hypnotherapy is that you enter a relaxed state where there’s greater access to your subconscious, so you’re susceptible to suggestion, creating new behaviours and breaking bad habits.
Nigel says: ‘A lot of sleeping problems are to do with anxiety and worry. We train people to think differently, so they gain more control over their emotional response.’
There are no half-measures with AquaVibe. ‘Transducers beneath the waterbed send sound waves through the water, through the person,’ says Nigel. ‘It dislodges stress in the muscle structure.
‘At the same time, you listen to a hypnotherapy meditative tape, and look into a sheet of pure colour. Because you don’t have to make out forms, it helps the brain relax.’
It looks bonkers (what with goggles, earphones and a waterbed) but after 15 minutes of sound vibrations buzzing through me as I gaze into a spectrum of pinks and blues, listening to pulsing beats and Nigel’s hypnotic voice imploring me to ‘let go’, I’m knocked out. I feel so groggy I could curl up on one of the state-of-the-art beds on show.
This would be perfect in hotel spas — guests could stagger straight to bed afterwards. €50 for a 45-minute session. Visit aquavibe.net
THE HOT/COLD WATER PILLOW
TEMPERATURE matters. Neuroscientist Dr Roy Raymann notes that if your bedroom is 25C (77f) or warmer, on average you’ll get 30 minutes less sleep than people whose bedroom
is 18C (65f) or cooler. The Moona thermo-regulated pill low claims to enhance sleep by adjusting your head temperature Moona’s CEO Coline Juin says ‘Our body temperature has a big impact on our sleep quality. We need our temperature to decrease that’s why we turn our pillow to the cool side.’ The Moona is a water-filled pad that’ s placed insid your pillow and cooled via a valve connected to a monitor.
‘It tracks and understands your sleep pattern using sensors, and regulates the temperature throughout the night,’ explains Coline.
I lie on the pillow. It’s set at a low temperature and feels icy. Happily, I can press a button on the bedside monitor to increase warmth. If I set a morning alarm, it will warm the pillow 20 minutes beforehand to ease my waking. ‘It’s very simple,’ I say. Coline assures me there’s a lot of tech and research behind it.
It comes with an app, of course, and you answer questions in order to establish your ideal ‘temperature profile’.
It could be brilliant for menopausal women suffering from night sweats, though perhaps everyone else can just turn their pillow to the cool side. Now €299, getmoona.com
A SPACE-AGE SLEEP PULSE
OF ALL the tech here, the Zeez Sleep Pebble, a neuroscientific response to our permanently wired state, seems the most revolutionary. It’s a flattish device, about six inches long. You press a button, and pop it under your pillow. And there’s no app required — joy! Director Anna McKay explains that as soon as you turn it on ‘it starts to produce the alpha frequency that mimics the brainwaves of a good sleeper’. The Zeez emits an extremely low power electromagnetic signal at similar frequencies to those generated by the sleeping brain. The brain picks up these signals, calming the nervous system and slowing the heart rate. When we sleep well, we activate areas of the brain that generate very slow frequencies. A poor sleeper’s brain activity is dominated by higher-frequency signals associated with light sleep. The Zeez helps by pulsing out the missing frequencies at appropriate times.
‘It gives us ten minutes of alpha signals for relaxation and ten minutes of theta, which is deep relaxation, during which most people fall asleep,’ explains Anna. ‘There’s a heartbeat signal, and when it’s time for deep sleep, there’s a deep sleep signal. We go through four cycles of sleep — just over six hours, plus relaxation, so it lasts seven hours.’
Research cited on the Zeez website seems impressive: 80% of users slept much better.
The Zeez is a seriously impressive piece of kit, which took ten years to develop. Its creator is Steve Walpole, a brilliant engineer who suffered severe migraines after a car accident. Brain scans showed that frequencies normally generated by the brain’s frontal lobes were missing. Steve created a device that could safely reintroduce those missing frequencies, using very weak electrical fields to strengthen natural brain activity, and it stopped his migraines.
In 2008 Anna enlisted him to work on sleep...and the rest may well become history. €394, zeez.org.uk
THE BRAINWAVE TRAINER
THE Somnuva, which looks like a sleek clock radio with a touchscreen, is an audio system that plays ambient sounds, including rain, waves, or wind.
Beneath this, an algorithm plays specific tones and pulses at frequencies that encourage your brain to follow a healthy sleep pattern. (It uses the same neuro- science that underpins the Zeez.)
Somnuva’s CEO and founder, Adam Spittles, says: ‘When you’re awake the brain activity runs at a beta wavelength, then you go down to alpha, theta, delta — which is a deep sleep — and then you come up.
‘This plays the same frequencies as those healthy sleep waves. It naturally trains your brain to follow this healthy sleep pattern.’
The company commissioned a trial with 36 participants who averaged four hours’ sleep a night. After three weeks with the Somnuva, their sleep increased by 2.35 hours per night.
While I didn’t try the Somnuva, I do like the sound of a product that appears to offer a simple solution. Call me a brat, but when I’m sleepdeprived my attitude is, ‘I don’t care about my data, just help me sleep.’ Launching in February at €422. Available for pre-order at somnuva.com
THE SMART NIGHT LIGHT
THE Homni Smart Sleep Lamp sits on your bedside table and analyses your bedroom environment — temperature, humidity, noise level and light — to give you pointers as to why you might not be sleeping well.
It comes with a sleep sensor — ‘Dot’, a magnetic disc you attach to your pillow — and, paired with the Wellness Coach sleep app, gathers information on your sleeping time, sleep cycles, and movement.
If that’s not detail enough, you can buy the Reston, a sensor strap that records cardiac and respiratory data. The Homni then awards you a ‘sleep score’ from one to 100.
Paul Bell of Terraillon, which makes the Homni, says: ‘You might have the heating coming on at night, and your body doesn’t like its temperature being raised and wakes you up. It’s the same with noise: you might simply need to shut a window.’
I do wonder whether you need a device to tell you your windows are letting in noise. Still, the lamp, designed in collaboration with the European Sleep Centre, has a soft red light (which has been shown to improve sleep quality, as it encourages the release of the sleep hormone melatonin) that rises and falls in a soothing rhythm to help you doze off.
Paul says: ‘It lasts between ten and 15 minutes, and you breathe to the light, to try to get yourself to sleep.’ (The lamp has a soft blue light to aid waking up.)
It also has in-built Bluetooth stereo speakers so you can listen to your own music. The lamp looks pleasantly yawn-inducing, but the wealth of information feels a bit much. €199, terraillon.com