Make your bedroom your personal sleep lab

Posted by anthonykuo , Jun, 2009 @ 5:13 pm

zeo sleep coach

Ever wonder why you wake up groggy in the morning, and why some days you just float through cloud, even if you’re getting the requisite 8 hours of sleep every night? It could be because your sleep isn’t good enough. In the realm of sleep, quality counts just as much as, if not more than quantity. Many of us wake up several times in the night, but don’t remember it. This, and sustained period of light, non-REM sleep aren’t as restorative as the REM sleep that we get when we dream.

Most of the time, if you want to analyze your sleep, you have to pay a lot of money and spend several nights at a sleep lab, a luxury that most of us can’t afford. But the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach, at only $399 (versus the thousands you’d need to spend at a sleep lab) presents a pretty reasonable alternative if you’re serious about your sleep. As you go to sleep, you put on a headband, which contains sensors that read your brain activity. It then keeps track of it as you sleep, and saves it to an SD card that you can then read on your computer. It also learns your sleep patterns, and you can set its alarm to wake you up at your natural waking points, instead of arbitrarily chosen times.

The Zeo also comes with an online service that lets you analyze your sleep data, and it aso makes recommendations. You can find more information about this here. I’m practically drooling over this because I often have trouble with waking up at the wrong part of my sleep cycle. But even if $399 is cheap compared to a sleep lab, it’s still just a fancy alarm clock.

Tags: alarm clock, groggy, morning, sleep coach, waking up, zeo