Tools for Well-Being (MAS S64)

This January, I toured South Korea, China, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong’s education systems alongside 30 other graduate students from Harvard and MIT.  The theme that we heard over and over again from high school students when we asked them how much time they spent studying was, “If you sleep 4 hours, you pass, if you sleep 5 hours, you fail.” Research and surveys show that this trend is indeed the norm, with implications on youth’s health and correlations to anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders. Looking at tools of well-being, how can we innovate on societal behavior norm changes?  Apart policy…

I searched “sleep tracker” in Apple App Store and downloaded all that looked relevant. These 2 apps don’t work ( or I couldn’t figure out how they work…) Sleep trackers with additional devices/accessories: These apps require a particular product/device but and I don’t have one so I didn’t get to try any of them. Sleep trackers with motion-tracking: These 3 track my movement during my sleep, I tried all of them. 1) Luna Tracker: I can set up an alarm to wake me up in the morning, I can choose to use the “smart alarm” which will go off when…

Hannah Ahlheim. “Governing the world of wakefulness:  The exploration of alertness, performance, and brain activity with the help of Stay-Awake-Men (1884-1964).” Nicole Eugene. “Working while narcoleptic.” John Marlovits. “Give me slack: Depression, alertness, and laziness in Seattle.” Stacey McKenna. “We’re supposed to be asleep? Vigilance, paranoia, and the alert methamphetamine user.” Matthew Wolf-Meyer. “Where have all our naps gone? Or Nathaniel Kleitman, the consolidation of sleep, and the historiography of emergence.” Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 24, Issue 2. 2013.   Stacey McKenna talks about the paranoid hyperawareness that degrades chronic amphetamine and methamphetamine users’ quality of life. Amphetamines “lead to increased heart rate, sleeplessness,…

Sleep Cycles Throughout a human lifespan several different sleep cycles are utilized. As a baby we naturally take advantage of frequent intervals of sleep and alert periods. Slowly we transition into a biphasic sleep cycle before finally settling into the traditional monophasic cycle. However, over time we slowly return back to a polyphasic sleep cycle as we get older. So what is the most effective way rejuvenate our bodies? Biphasic sleep cycles or siestas are popular in some countries such as Spain and is the most popular polyphasic sleep cycle. The siesta involves a large sleep period of 5-6 hours…

Introduction We know that sleep cycles are governed by our body’s internal circadian rhythm(s), and that numerous studies have shown that blue light can disrupt these patterns – or conversely, promote alertness [1]. The proof of this is almost self-evident: imagine trying to drift off to sleep in a room flooded with (conventional) florescent lighting. Now, imagine trying to go to sleep in a room lit – perhaps even a little unevenly – with moderately bright incandescent fixtures. It’s easy to see that both could be disruptive to getting sleep. Still, we could further imagine that if we were to…

I often hear people talking about power naps, and problem solving while sleeping. I’ve been told it’s good to imagine taking out the garbage from your brain before going to sleep.  I’ve met several people that insist on taking naps to boost their creativity regardless of how close they are to a deadline. It’s hard to say if it works or not based on individual anecdotes.  And if it does work, why don’t we have more of a napping culture? I think it’s safe to say, in the work culture in the US, napping isn’t widely used as a tool…

What is it? Intelclinic’s first project, NeuroOn, recently skyrocketed past their $100,000 goal on kickstarter to achieve $438,573 in funding. It is clear that there is excitement in the air surrounding the first sleep aid, in the form of an eye mask, that actively combines brain waves (EEG), muscle tension (EMG) and eye movements (EOG) to track your sleeping patterns. This has already been done with accelerometers but Adam Kamilcyzk, CEO of Intelclinic, claims that using algorithms to analyze EEG, EMG and EOG components together is arguably more accurate and reliable. Through this data that is analyzed through software on…

I have chosen to examine two products designed to track the sleep and well-being of infants, with specific attention to marketing emphases on improvement of parental sleep quality. The Mimo and Owlet products use wearable sensors to monitor combinations of the movement, heart rate, respiration, temperature and blood oxygenation of infants. Data from those sensors are used to generate visualizations and alerts delivered via mobile and web interfaces. These interfaces allow parents to monitor the above-mentioned metrics, along with user-reported information on infants’ routines (feeding/diapering/etc.) and vital statistics that can be tracked over time. Both products’ web sites feature prominent…

For our sleep module, I read an interesting paper from 2011 by Vladyslav Vyazovskiy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, et al., entitled “Local sleep in awake rats.” You can find it in Nature 472 (pp. 443-447), or at the links at the bottom of the post. The researchers set out to investigate the effects of sleep deprivation on neuronal activity by implanting rats with 16-channel microwire arrays in layers throughout their motor and parietal cortices and observing them while they were awake and asleep. Each array channel measured the local field potential (by EEG) and neural activity at that specific…