The engineers at Circadia want everyone to get better and more restful sleep. They believe that the key to good sleep is light, and its effects on our internal body clock and circadian rhythms. The team is running a Kickstarter campaign for Circadia, a sleep monitoring and light therapy device.
Circadia consists of three phases. A contactless sleep monitor that checks heart rate, breathing and movement, from up to eight feet away. Temperature, humidity, ambient light and sound are also measured while the user sleeps. Proprietary programming and algorithms then predict your sleep stages, build a model of your body and its performance throughout the day, and calculate how far off your internal body clock is compared to real time.
Once your cycles are studied alarms can be set to bring the user awake with light and sounds. The lights trigger 15-30 minutes before desired wake up times, and sounds can be soft nature noises, Spotify tracks or even that loud incessant buzzing we all remember from high school. During the day the light can be programmed to boost alertness or provide soft light if a user is awake late at night.
The research that’s gone into this project is impressive. Circadia’s team has studied current data and brought Professor Rusell Foster on as an advisor. Professor Foster is a pioneer in sleep science and gave one of my favorite TED Talks about sleep. A summary of the data used to inform Circadia’s development is available online in infographic form.
From a personal standpoint my wife has a light-up alarm clock and definitely helps her wake up in the morning. I spent the night in a sleep lab this last month and the probes and wires definitely hampered the sleeping, so the wireless features of Circadia definitely appeal to me. I’m not sure how this would fare against the slumbering kids that live in my house but it would definitely be an interesting experiment. The Kickstarter campaign ends July 6, 2017 and if successful first units are expected to ship in April 2018.