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The way we live is changing fast. Every fortnight in our Future Focus series, supported by Volkswagen, we’ll look at how one aspect of everyday life could change in the coming years. This week: music.
SICK OF HITTING the snooze button and groggily crawling out of bed in the mornings? Did you oversleep and miss the bus to work? Or maybe you tossed and turned all night, and sleep never came to begin with.
No matter what your particular sleep ailment looks like, if there isn’t a solution already, over the next few years there’ll probably be an app for it.
Sleep technology that used to be an array of eye masks and ear plugs is expanding to include apps, headsets, sensors, monitors and a range of other equipment to help you sleep better. And currently, the market is flooded – the international market for sleep paraphernalia is expected to reach over $76 billion in 2019.
If it wasn’t enough for every part of your waking life to be connected, soon your sleep will be too. Drooling on your pillow may no longer be acceptable once your pillow is able to talk back to you. And you may not need anyone beside you in bed at all once you try out the Somnox sleep robot, which was released this year and which mimics human breathing to cuddle you to sleep, however creepy it may sound. However, the future of sleep is more than individual devices; it mightn’t be long until your whole bedroom is smart enough to look after itself.
In recent months Chinese company Sleepace debuted its IoT smart bedroom, Dreamlife. Dreamlife includes a sensor which monitors your sleep, a cloud which stores your data and IoT devices which do things like adjust the temperature, close the curtains and turn off the TV when the sensors sense you lying down on your bed. It’ll do anything short of brushing your teeth.
At the launch in January at CES 2018, the CEO of Sleepace, David Huang, said: “We predict that the number of people who use sleep technology will double in 2018, with smart mattresses and pillows integrated with other smart home technology in 20% of households by 2025.”
But one of the world’s more innovative sleep offerings is coming from Ireland. SleepScore Labs is based between California and Dublin. Their app, SleepScore, accesses your phone and can detect your sleep patterns without using wearable devices or sensors.
Using the phone’s speakers, the app sends sound waves, which are reflected off the user’s body and received through the microphone. SleepScore then interprets the reflected sound waves to sense breathing and body movements. The data can identify which sleep stage the user is in.
“Sleep affects all facets of people’s health, and yet there has been no easy way to accurately measure or track it everywhere we sleep—until now,” said Colin Lawlor, CEO of SleepScore Labs. “We’ve been developing this technology longer than the iPhone has existed. We’re excited that for the first time, virtually everyone can get a truer picture of their sleep health for free and make smarter decisions about how to get a more restful night’s sleep.”
However, not everyone believes that apps and tech will herald a new age of sleep. There are still question marks over how effective sleep tech and monitoring is, and whether knowing everything about the various stages of your sleep will actually help you drop off at night.
“For me the only benefit in using apps to monitor sleep is the chance that they may raise the user’s awareness of sleep and thus modify their behaviour to be more ‘sleep positive’,” says independent sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley. “However recent research has shown that what they are in fact doing is causing a degree of anxiety about sleep which is probably causing poor sleep in itself.”
We’ve certainly become more aware of our troubled relationship with sleep in the past few years. The increase in our use of screens before bed has gradually cut into our sleep time. In a survey by Aviva health insurance last year, 35pc of Irish adults said they do not believe they are getting the right amount of sleep, and ranked Ireland as the second most sleep-deprived country after the UK. Another recent survey commissioned by IKEA found that one third of Irish people are getting less than six hours sleep a night.
So will sleep tech actually help us get better sleep? Currently, future possibilities seem endless. One offering, Neuroon, claims to help to enable lucid dreaming. You take part in a series of meditations, and the sleep mask triggers flashing lights during REM sleep which brings awareness to the fact that you’re dreaming. Similar sleep and lucid dreaming products use variations on flashing lights, but currently, these are said only to improve the experiences of people who can already lucid dream, not those who have never had a lucid dream before.
While lucid dreaming tech is only at the beginning of its journey, it’s possible that in the coming years we’ll see improvements in the tech which helps to enable it for newbies.
Or it could even be possible that we cut down on the hours we spend sleeping altogether. A study by UC San Francisco neurology professor Ying-Hui Fu showed that a gene which allows some humans to live on just a few hours of sleep a night can allow mice to do the same thing. A mutation in the DEC2 gene helps control a hormone which maintains wakefulness. It’s a long way away yet, but if the same thing could be done in humans, the one third of our lives we spend asleep could become a lot shorter.
In the short term if you’re satisfied with extending your hours spent sleeping as much as possible, there’s worse that could be done than snore-cancelling earbuds, such as those released by QuietOn this year. If you’re struggling to drop off to sleep tonight, there are already options available; these include the Calm app’s recently released bedtime story, Once Upon a GDPR, wherein former BBC radio announcer Peter Jefferson reads an extract from the new GDPR legislation to put you to sleep.
Today, we already have a lot of quick fixes that help us drop off, such as apps, meditations and wearable tech. But it’s more than likely that the future of sleep will be smart, lucid, and eventually, short.
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Well that’s what happens when you run a public health system on the brink of collapse for 9 years. Soon as there’s unforeseen extra load placed on it, you’re in trouble.
@Unconvertible Rebel: Get a grip. Government doing a fantastic job, look across the water both ways.
@Unconvertible Rebel: Bit of a difference between an extra load and a global pandemic. Health services all over the world are struggling to deal with this issue
@Unconvertible Rebel: Ah stop, I agree our public health service was under performing but nobody could have imagine a health emergency of these proportions.
@Unconvertible Rebel: no country in the world has been able to cope with it
@Unconvertible Rebel: a ridiculous comment. You can’t run a health service for a pandemic that might happen every hundred years. It’s not feasible and definitely not necessary.
@Unconvertible Rebel: oh ,just go away please -I am sick and tired of the same old BS being trotted out here every day – If you have nothing positive to say just keep quiet .
@Unconvertible Rebel: There’s no hospital system in the world that would have the capicity we’ll need in the coming weeks. By the way, our health system has been unslder resourced for much longer than 9 years, not sure where you’re getting that time frame from!
@Unconvertible Rebel: my sentiments exactly, as much as they appear to be doing all they can, there has been fundamental problems that have gone unsolved in the HSE for years which has then caused this enormous pressure on the service. I wonder statistically speaking if you contract serious complications with covid-19 in which areas of the country are you most likely to die, such as it is with heart attacks etc due to lack of services and resources? Morbid but true.
@Unconvertible Rebel: Look if you’re going to use this epidemic to score political points the *least* you could do is actually expand on the topic in some kind of meaningful or useful way.
For example, as a country we are in the Top 10 worldwide in terms of spending per capita on health. As such we don’t have a spending (ie political) issue, we have a management (ie civil-service) issue. So the reality is it doesn’t really matter who gets elected in terms of our health service since our civil service is entrenched in their position like it’s the Somme and the year is 1916.
And if you ask a politician what they think they can do about this they will just stare at you as if you just asked them to fly. So not only does the actual problem get almost no recognition, it’s further compounded by the fact that our health service is treated like a political football come election time. Unless we solve these structural blockers actual reform is borderline impossible. You might as well be trying to learn how to fly.
@Breda Kelly: Ablab alamas Canadian eh?
@Tony Lyons: much like the Who and its Chinese masters you seem to overlook Taiwan
@Unconvertible Rebel: Sit down in a dark room you fool.
@Breda Kelly: me ass doing a great job
@Unconvertible Rebel: clown
@Breda Kelly: another North-South polist among us. Shameful.
@Breda Kelly: I’m don’t seem to be buying into this government doing a great job.. the government are simple taking orders from the health professionals. And why is Leo Varadkar posing for photos. Seems every opportunity is a photo shoot for them..
@Unconvertible Rebel: Sinn Fein troll. You are doing more damage to the party with your rubbish on herd than their elected members singing IRA songs drunk in bars.
@Paul O’Sullivan: oh look, another brand new faceless twitter account calling anyone who isnt singing leos praises SF trolls.
the spin unit is back
@Breda Kelly: per percentage of population, the UK are faring both better and worse than us in Ireland, so it’s a fairly uninformed argument that they are faring much worse than us. Better In UK: 0.0449% as of population who are infected as to Ireland’s 0.0714%. However, deaths in UK 0.00354% compared to Ireland’s 0.00176%. Median age in Ireland is 36.5years while in the UK it is 40years, so you should statistically see more deaths there than here as a % of population. What I’d love to compare are the number of beds and ICU beds, ventilators and testing kits
@John O Brien: the sign of a good leader is listening to the experts. Look at the 2 countries either side of us!
@Irene Mc Hugh: Irene it would be very boring here if people cannot say what they want. Be more open minded to a variety of comments & opinions. Adds variety.
If u can’t take it deactivate your account.
@Declan Edward: you haven’t taken into account that we had tested I’ve twice as many per head on the positive numbers
@johnny onion eye: didn’t take it into account! We’re pretty much on the same playing field so. I did expect UKs numbers to be much worse considering that 83% live in urban areas compared to Ireland’s 63%.
@Breda Kelly: delays in carrying out testing and test results government claim shortage of supply yes other countries dont have same problems.
Yes doing amazing job alright
@Unconvertible Rebel: shut up with your pander you can see the whole world is suffering. Please stop with wrongful propaganda. God bless
@Maria: Dustin would look good in comparison to those two as apes
@Declan Edward: I’m sorry Declan but you can’t draw meaningful comparisons with the U.K. in terms of the numbers of infected. They aren’t testing serious numbers of people. Proportionately, Ireland is testing far more people. The U.K. stats are internationally accepted as unreliable. Moreover, where deaths occur outside of the hospital environment due to Covid they are not included in the U.K. figures at the moment as I understand it.
@John O Brien: Another person who thinks, conveniently, that the Govt are taking orders from civil servants. The legal of ignorance amongst a cohort of certain Journal commentators about how democratic Government works is illuminating. The Govt takes advice from civil and public servants. Advice. All key decisions are taken by Government and nobody else. They are them accountable for those decisions. The Govt don’t follow “orders” from the unelected. They are not SF for goodness sake.
Harris telling us the HSE is under pressure! Yes Simon we’ve been telling you that for years now!
@Colette Kearns: I remember visiting hospitals be in the 1970s when religious orders were in charge. Everything was spotless. You could smell the antiseptic in the air. There wasn’t any huge waiting lists. A first world health service at time when we were economically poor. It seems like our liberal “progression” has regressed our health system to that of a 3rd world nation. Bring back the nuns!
@Colette Kearns: thanks Colette for your intelligent input to the unforeseen problem Ireland and the whole world are experiencing at this moment in time. When this is all over run for the elections and you can show us all the expert you are while running the health service in this country.
@John Devaney: Yeah, I used to live it when they beat the snot out of us when they ran the schools. But sure at least they were spotless schools
@Colette Kearns: maybe you should run the health service so?. We can all complain. Unfortunately the HSE isn’t a quick fix. Increase in funding has been allocated in the last few budgets, but it is once of those areas that every country find it hard to run effectively.
@John Devaney: no. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. My grandmothers used to say that you only go into hospital to die. Nuns or no nuns, we didn’t have a wonderful health system. There was a very recent modern push to reform it, by which I mean shake off the abusive practices that other countries had successfully reformed from 1964 onwards. You were far too young to realise how many women were literally crippled by an outdated system; nor how many men died before their time. Oh, and the clean smell of antiseptic was applied by enslaved pregnant women, conned into believing they deserved to work for a pittance, while their children were being starved in orphanages. Stop sniffing the air and support the health service staff working in this century.
@John Devaney: in the 1970s DOBwas bearly out of short pants
@John Devaney: Was that when you were out pulling women? Looking back is great, the good times ehhh…. except medicine has moved on quite a bit, costs a fortune and we can treat way more illnesses…..
@Steve O’Reilly: BS very few developed countries in Europe have a similar shambles of a health service as ours.
@John Devaney: that’s a common misconception. Hospitals nowadays are just as clean. Its the superbugs you can’t see due to decades of over prescribing which are the problem in controlling infections.
@John Devaney: leave them where they are. That was the time where u would be two weeks in hospital if u were having your appendix out.
@Colette Kearns: Very true. Its what happens when you initiative something to Death. The money can spread over far far too much and not enough Butter. Scale back protect the core services.
Will you all stop bashing Unconvertible Rebel..and look at the photo…Leo will want to practice what he preaches…He is NOT 2 metres away
@brian reid: I see that. It might be the camera angle, it’s hard to judge with foreshortening. They certainly don’t look as if they’re 2 metres apart. We can’t tell but let’s assume for the sake of thinking it through that they have both been tested recently and aren’t carriers, because they have essential roles.
@Fiona Fitzgerald: Silly statement..( they have been tested )does not stop them from catching it in the future…this virus does not distinguish what job you do..
@brian reid: no fear he wont go near her.
@Paul O’Sullivan: maybe she would just to let him see what he is missing
This has publicity stunt wrote all over it. How in the midst of the worse pandemic we have seen in our lifetime is he going round smiling in these pictures like its something to be proud of. I really dont understand this man at the best of times in the riddles and smoke screens but these pics are like a bloody advert!
@Christine Hanway: reminds me a bit of when he saw what way the wind was blowing & jumped on the Repeal bandwagon. Everything is calculated PR opportunity with him
@Christine Hanway: did he not advise us to NOT make any non essential journeys? Did he not advise us to stay at home where possible? Was this really an essential journey, did both himself and Harris really have to be there? Another photo opportunity and a chance for them to tell us how wonderful they are.
His ego is out of control!!!
Very hygienic, park your ar#e on the treatment couch. The hired help will deal with it.
Government doing a good job. We are lucky we are not in the UK or the US. EU overlords doing sod all for anyone.
have your say