UW scientist wants to help you get your zzzzz’s
Sep 11, 2012, 4:22 PM | Updated: Sep 12, 2012, 5:40 am
So, how did you sleep last night? Could it have been better? It should come naturally, but a lot of people find a good night’s sleep is anything but easy to come by.
“While you can go into a sleep lab and have them very accurately assess your sleep quality, it can be difficult for them to assess things in your bedroom that are negatively impacting your sleep,” says Matt Kay, a PhD student at the University of Washington.
The computer science and engineering student has been working with a sleep scientist at the University of Washington Medical Center to create the “Lullaby.” It is a device small enough to sit on your bedside table that can track the sound, light, movement, and temperature in your room all night long.
“I think there’s kind of this interesting curiosity that people have about their sleep, because it’s this sort of this unconscious experience,” Kay says.
He has already had a chance to test out the Lullaby prototype. He awoke late one day and noticed there had been some kind of sleep disturbance that morning captured by the machine.
“One of the things we can do is actually play back sound and infrared images, and I saw myself answering the phone. A telemarketer had called me at eight in the morning and I had completely forgotten,” says Kay.
The Lullaby would be ideal for sleep centers who want to study their patients’ habits at home. At a cost of just about a hundred dollars to make, Kay says it could also be sold to everyday consumers. In that case, he says he would like to create software that can analyze Lullaby’s data.
Right now, the Lullaby uses recommended sleep data for temperature, light and other information. Kay hopes to create a system where the Lullaby can track when a person is sleeping well and create recommendations for the individual user.
They still have a ways to go before the device is ready to hit store shelves, and Matt says it won’t be cheap to make that happen. So, could there be a Kickstarter campaign in his future?
“I hadn’t thought of that. That’s actually a good idea,” says Kay.
