Scientifically Inspired
By using a personalized Sleep Diary that collects information when you set your alarm clock, you can easily understand your sleep and your unique biological patterns. This can be used to help you improve your behaviors and sleep health. Addionally, based on the idea of relaxation therapy and stimulus control therapy, Proactive Sleep enables you to play music and sounds to soothe you to sleep at night. Lastly, you can help yourself to be alert in the morning by setting any song in your iTunes library as your alarm and by playing a stimulating game in order to turn off your alarm. This is based on findings that show that auditory, motor, and cognitive stimulation can help you to wake-up feeling refreshed more quickly.
Combating Insomnia
Insomnia is the most pervasive sleeping disorder, which has deleterious consequences to all that suffer from it. We address insomnia in two ways:
1) Based on the idea of cognitive behaviorial interventions, we provide you with information about healthy sleep and data on your own unique sleep patterns. We have an innovative way of displaying your personalized sleep stats by showing your daily behavior and your average behavior. This enables you to directly see how your sleep habits may change and how this affects you. The sleep diary provides you with information about your average amount of sleep, average number of awakenings, your score on the vigilance game, and the consistency of your sleep, which is whether you sleep the same amount of hours every night.
2) Ambient music or sounds can be equally as effective in combating insomnia as prescription medication, without the negative side-effects[8]. This is an example of stimulus control therapy, a widely known and validated therapy, which involves associating stimuli with sleep in order to trigger the behavior changes. Other examples of stimulus control therapy include using your bed only for sleep, getting out of bed as soon as you wake up in the morning, and following a consistent sleep schedule.
Combating Sleep Inertia
Sleep inertia caused by the brain decreasing its energy expenditure during sleep. Thus, anything that increases brain activity will decrease sleep inertia resulting in you being more refreshed in the morning [1]. Scientific experiments have demonstrated that:
• Waking up is a gradual process[2].
• The adverse effects of sleep inertia can be totally abolished by a moderately intense continuous noise[3].
• Countermeasures to sleep inertia include physical and mental exercises, external noise, bright light, and caffeine[4] .
• Bright light reduces sleep inertia after napping[5].
• Stimulating tasks, such as the Proactive Games, may help to promote alertness when sleep deprived[6][7].
Thank you for participating in this important work and we wish you a restful sleep!
1) Tassi, P & Muet, A. 2000. Sleep Inertia. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 4, 4, 341-353.
2) Tassi P, Nicolas A, Dewasmes G et al (1992). Effects of noise on sleep inertia as a function of circadian placement of a one-hour nap. Percept Motor Skills, 75: 291-302.
3) Hajak, G., Klingelhofer, J., Schulz-Varszegi, M., Matzander, G., Sander, D., Conrad, B., & Ruther, E (1994). Relationship between cerebral blood flow velocities and cerebral electrical activity in sleep. Sleep 17, pg. 11-19.
4) Ferraro & De Gennaro. (2000). The sleep inertia phenomenon during the sleep-wake
transition: theoretical and operational issues. Aviat Space Environ Med 71. pg. 843-848.
5) Hayashi, M., Masuda, A., & Hori, T. (2003). The alerting effects of caffeine, bright light and face washing after a short daytime nap. Clinical Neurophysiology 114, 2268-2278.
6) Baulk, S., Reyner, L., & Horne, J. (2001) Driver sleepiness-evaluation of reaction time measurement as a secondary task. Sleep, 24, 695-698.
7) Rupp, T., Arnedt, T., Acebo, C., & Carskadon, M. (2004). Performance on a dual driving simulation and subtraction task following sleep restriction. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 99, 739-753.
8) "How did you sleep last night?" (2008). Consumer Reports, 12-16.