Can tech help improve your sleep?

CES has been underway in Las Vegas for several days now and amid the demos, launches, meeting, greeting, keynotes and all the walking, there’s one thing on a lot of people’s minds: sleep.

So, Marketplace’s Lily Jamali stopped by the National Sleep Foundation’s booth to meet some folks there thinking about sleep. She spoke with Biquan Luo, co-founder and CEO of Lumos Tech, whose company makes what looks like a regular sleep mask, but has embedded LED lights. It’s designed to help recalibrate a user’s sleep schedule.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Biquan Luo: Users tell us what their current bedtime is and then when they want to move their bedtime to. So, if you’re a night owl that always goes to bed at 3 a.m., but you want to become an early morning person, then you would just tell us, “I’m currently going to bed at 3 a.m. but I want to go to bed at 11 and be able to fall asleep.”

Lily Jamali: You’re saying that’s possible, that I can go from being a night owl to an early bird?

Luo: Yes.

Jamali: Wow. I’ll believe it when I see it. It’s quite a proposition.

Luo: You should try it! By adjusting your circadian clock, you’re able to move your sleep schedule. So, when you’re using our mask and our app, the app will determine what the best sleep program for you is and then it sends that information to the sleep mask. So, what you do as a user is you put on the mask before you go to bed at your normal bedtime, and sometime during the night after you fall asleep, these very short, low-intensity, brief light flashes come on. They penetrate through your eyelids without you knowing, because you’re asleep, and it secretly changes the part of your brain that controls the natural internal clock.

Jamali: What it is about those light flashes that achieves this effect that you’re describing?

Luo: It’s actually well-understood that light regulates your circadian clock. That’s why we get up in the morning and that’s why we sleep in the dark. But instead of using sunlight, you can use very short light flashes to achieve the same or even better shift in your circadian clock.

Jamali: It sounds like you have a new feature on the mask. What is it and how does it work?

Luo: You’re talking about the sleep optimizer. That’s a module that we just created in December to solve my sleep problem that I’ve had for about 10 years. I’ll fall asleep and then at 3 a.m., I’ll just naturally wake up for no reason. It’s not because I have to take care of kids, or the neighbor’s dog is barking, or I have pain, or I need to use the bathroom. I just wake up naturally, and it’s a consistent issue. It’s brutal. So, I designed this module to help me stay asleep, and that’s the sleep optimizer.

So how it works is if you wake up in the middle of the night, similar problem as me, likely there is a misalignment of your circadian rhythm, the internal clock when you sleep. We can use these light flashes to fix it. So, after the first night of using this, instead of waking up at 3 a.m., I woke up at 4:30 a.m. And then I used it for another night, and I didn’t wake up, so I stopped waking up myself. Now, I only wake up when my baby pounds the bed and needs attention. Now I just don’t wake up spontaneously. It works amazingly. I’m super excited about this feature, and I’m hoping to get it into the hands of more people who have a similar problem.

Jamali: Technology and sleep might seem like conflicting ideas for some people. We’re often told that less screen time and less artificial light will help us sleep better. What do you say to that?

Luo: It’s not necessarily like technology is all bad for sleep. It depends on how you use the technology. And then if you could design the technology to be less intrusive or as low-key as possible while doing its job, then it’s going to be better for sleep. That’s why we have designed our product to be as plain, as simple as possible, so that you are not dealing with some clunky sleep mask or goggles that are very unfamiliar or strange.

Jamali: Yeah, it feels like a piece of fabric to cover your eyes.

Luo: We designed it so that you don’t have to jump through hoops. You just go to bed at your normal bedtime.

Jamali: When it comes to sleep tech, where are we at in the trajectory? It’s probably kind of a new concept for a lot of people, but is it a pretty robust area of tech right now?

Luo: I think it’s emerging and up and coming. So, you see the major sleep trackers like Whoop and Oura Ring, which a few years back, only people who are interested in the most cutting-edge technology were wearing them. But now they’re in more and more people’s hands. What has not caught on is an active solution. So, you have trackers to track your sleep and you know how well you slept last night, but you don’t know how to improve that. There are traditional solutions that are very mature in sleep labs and that sleep doctors tell you to do, but then translating that into our daily lives and to the general consumer has been a huge gap that has not been filled yet.

We’ve known that light therapy regulates the internal clock for many, many years. It’s a well-established field in science, but it has not been very fruitful to translate that into an everyday product that people will use to improve sleep. So that’s catching on and that’s what we’re trying to do: give you the tools based on solid science to help you improve sleep.

Jamali: Yeah, because I know I’m not sleeping well, but what am I going to do about it, right?

Luo: Right. And the more passive the solution is, the better. Humans naturally don’t want to jump through a lot of hoops, so the more passive solution in which you don’t have to do much or anything special, the more compliance that you’re going to see.

More on this

The Lumos sleep mask is considered a low-intensity form of light therapy technology and the device has been widely marketed as a treatment for jet lag. But while light therapy can help with sleep, the National Sleep Foundation finds it can also be used to deal with some types of depression.

Sleep issues like insomnia and excessive daytime sleepiness often go hand in hand with depression and anxiety. Therapy lights like these one recommended by Wirecutter use a similar technology and have recently exploded in popularity as one way to help deal with some depression symptoms.