6 ms·

NeuroOn, the smart sleep mask: not a medical device, but better than a coin toss

73 points by stared 10y ago

alxd_org 10y ago
If you have any questions about my blogpost or NeuroOn experiment story, I'll be happy to address them. I have been already notified that I may have misinterpreted actigraphy publications I cited - I'll look into that tomorrow and gladly update the post with my findings :)
- imagist 10y ago
  Did you get paid to do this?
  - alxd_org 10y ago
    As I wrote at the very bottom, it's the opposite - I paid for the lab myself. I had huge hopes for NeuroOn - similar to what some people hoped for with Myo Armband - to finally have some customer grade EEG / EOG available for hacking and playing with. When I realized that the company doesn't have a prototype working as they claimed - or at least won't show it to anybody and don't have any whitepapers, I got really irritated. There was nobody to properly debunk them. Journalists don't have the knowledge, researchers won't be able to publish that, most hackers won't be able to communicate the message properly. So I decided to do an experiment myself, as open as possible, for everyone to recalculate and prove me wrong if I am.
- diego_moita 10y ago
  Do you know the accuracy of other sleep tracking devices such as fitness bands?
  - alxd_org 10y ago
    It seems that I've made a mistake with comparing NeuroOn sleep stage detection accuracy with actigraphy, which only measures sleeping/not-sleeping states. I'm going to correct that in a second. You are probably looking for https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20374444 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20374444
- digler999 10y ago
  my question is why do you make false assertions such as this: "it could try to wake the user, resulting in grogginess and complete lack of energy till the end of the day". you cite source [4], which is the wikipedia article on "sleep inertia" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia The wikipedia page doesn't say you'll have a "complete lack of energy till the end of the day", or anything close to that. it says "Morning sleep inertia may take several hours to dissipate" and "Sleep inertia is the impaired cognitive performance immediately upon awakening, which decays over tens of minutes", and "In the majority of cases, morning sleep inertia is experienced for 15 to 30 minutes after waking". so my question is, whose idea was it to embellish using the phrases "complete lack of energy" and "for the rest of the day" ?
  - alxd_org 10y ago
    Thank you for pointing that out, I will update it in a moment. I've written a dozen versions of this article trying to accommodate different readers, including non-technical startup community. One of the main functions of NeuroOn is its alarm clock, which promises to "always wake you up in the best moment", which seems not to be true in ~31% of cases. When I used direct wording about "sleep inertia", my test readers with no background in sleep science just said "Meh, it's better than without the mask anyway, isn't it?". It's an honest mistake on my part, which only shows how hard science communication really is - and how hard is to choose a language in debunking bold claims.
comboy 10y ago
I miss zeo so much :| It was easily hackable, it had a serial interface and apart from scripting your own alarm clock you could e.g. train meditation by looking at the realtime chart. I wish there was a comparable product (that also does not depend on cloud). Lucid dreaming induction function in neuroon looks pretty neat though.
- alxd_org 10y ago
  Have you tried OpenBCI? http://openbci.com/ http://openbci.com/ It's not standardized - so you'll have to make a headband yourself and choose some electrodes, but it gives you full access to all the signals. And don't worry about the 250/125Hz limitation, it can be quite easily hacked to write to SD with much better sampling rate.
  - comboy 10y ago
    Haven't heard of it. Looks quite promising. Price for the board doesn't seem to be too bad either given the ADC used. Definitely not something to sleep in, but could be an interesting time sink. Have you? And did you maybe do any nouroon like experiments with some other devices?
    - alxd_org 10y ago
      Sadly, not many. I'm doing a lot of other things, being a front end developer full-time ;) I've played with OpenBCI and with some friends we tried to make it save signals with 1kHz sampling rate. No big-scale experiments so far. Two days ago I checked out Myo on a friend born without a hand, with some hopes to create a simple interface based on her "phantom limb" gestures (she has full forearm with normal enough muscles). Sadly, Myo doesn't allow access to raw EMG signal - and my idea is to create Myo-like open hardware electrode boards to connect with OpenBCI and get some serious signals. EDIT: Regarding OpenBCI - it's open hardware, you can make it yourself for ~under $100 if I'm right.
      - mattkrause 10y ago
aresant 10y ago
Amazon marketplace, kickstarter, and etsy have unleashed a FIREHOSE of pseudo-medical products (And other consumer products) that review systems and regulators are just not equipped to handle. A startup that I wish would happen would be a truly NON biased review organization - eg consumer reports but for the internet age. Not just a consumer reports as digital first but an organization that is able to respond to the deluge of new products & product claims we see as consumers. We were recently trying to buy a foam mattress and immediately got sucked into this huge vortex of misinformation to the point that I just gave up. On the one side you have "mommy bloggers" yelling "tempurpedic offgasses give you CANCER!" and linking to a group of similar non-scientific studies. On the other end is a group that says "latex is the only all natural foam!!!!" but then links to amazon products made in Thailand / etc full of mispellings / no oversight / etc. Or the recent expose of how truffle oils (1) don't actually contain truffles. It's insanity! Clearly the FTC isn't the solution @ this point to oversee consumer protection. (1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453103
- jameslk 10y ago
  I'm actually working on exactly this currently. It's called Praisee. We're trying to focus just on the review and product decision making side of things, with a heavy emphasis on community, trust and personalization. Amazon is not a reviews service, nor is YouTube, yet this is where people turn. Nobody else seems to be taking the issue seriously, so we are. The hardest part of building something like this is the chicken and egg problem, which is why I don't think there exists a good service for this yet. It's actually really hard to find a group of trustable product reviewers who stay engaged. People don't buy reviewable things that often, so you need another hook to get them to come back and sustain the ecosystem. This has been the hardest part of getting traction for our startup. We're working hard on the problem. Hopefully you'll hear more about us soon.
  - Mathnerd314 10y ago
    > It's actually really hard to find a group of trustable product reviewers who stay engaged. There's a ton of bloggers and paid reviewers: http://www.productreviewmom.com/2013/11/how-to-become-product-review-blogger.html http://www.productreviewmom.com/2013/11/how-to-become-produc.... All you need is a way to aggregate the one or two complaints / solid facts per review while filtering out all the fluff promotion verbiage. Mining truth, in other words.
BatFastard 10y ago
Is there any data on the lucid dreaming aspect of NeuroOn? What percentage of people have lucid dreaming using it? Are those people experienced lucid dreamer already? Just this aspect alone is enough to gain my interest. Also how is it for side sleepers? Ever since my motorcycle accident I can only sleep on my side.
- alxd_org 10y ago
  There is no data that I know of, haven't heard about any papers from NeuroOn, they aren't very fond of whitepapers. As to real science on the topic, you can check http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012001614 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012... As someone who used NeuroOn I can't see anything wrong with using it sleeping on the side. It's still uncomfortable (to me), but it's not a deal-breaker.

73 points by stared 10y ago

If you have any questions about my blogpost or NeuroOn experiment story, I'll be happy to address them. I have been already notified that I may have misinterpreted actigraphy publications I cited - I'll look into that tomorrow and gladly update the post with my findings :)

imagist 10y ago
Did you get paid to do this?
- alxd_org 10y ago
  As I wrote at the very bottom, it's the opposite - I paid for the lab myself. I had huge hopes for NeuroOn - similar to what some people hoped for with Myo Armband - to finally have some customer grade EEG / EOG available for hacking and playing with. When I realized that the company doesn't have a prototype working as they claimed - or at least won't show it to anybody and don't have any whitepapers, I got really irritated. There was nobody to properly debunk them. Journalists don't have the knowledge, researchers won't be able to publish that, most hackers won't be able to communicate the message properly. So I decided to do an experiment myself, as open as possible, for everyone to recalculate and prove me wrong if I am.
diego_moita 10y ago
Do you know the accuracy of other sleep tracking devices such as fitness bands?
- alxd_org 10y ago
  It seems that I've made a mistake with comparing NeuroOn sleep stage detection accuracy with actigraphy, which only measures sleeping/not-sleeping states. I'm going to correct that in a second. You are probably looking for https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20374444 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20374444
digler999 10y ago
my question is why do you make false assertions such as this: "it could try to wake the user, resulting in grogginess and complete lack of energy till the end of the day". you cite source [4], which is the wikipedia article on "sleep inertia" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia The wikipedia page doesn't say you'll have a "complete lack of energy till the end of the day", or anything close to that. it says "Morning sleep inertia may take several hours to dissipate" and "Sleep inertia is the impaired cognitive performance immediately upon awakening, which decays over tens of minutes", and "In the majority of cases, morning sleep inertia is experienced for 15 to 30 minutes after waking". so my question is, whose idea was it to embellish using the phrases "complete lack of energy" and "for the rest of the day" ?
- alxd_org 10y ago
  Thank you for pointing that out, I will update it in a moment. I've written a dozen versions of this article trying to accommodate different readers, including non-technical startup community. One of the main functions of NeuroOn is its alarm clock, which promises to "always wake you up in the best moment", which seems not to be true in ~31% of cases. When I used direct wording about "sleep inertia", my test readers with no background in sleep science just said "Meh, it's better than without the mask anyway, isn't it?". It's an honest mistake on my part, which only shows how hard science communication really is - and how hard is to choose a language in debunking bold claims.

comboy 10y ago

I miss zeo so much :| It was easily hackable, it had a serial interface and apart from scripting your own alarm clock you could e.g. train meditation by looking at the realtime chart. I wish there was a comparable product (that also does not depend on cloud). Lucid dreaming induction function in neuroon looks pretty neat though.

alxd_org 10y ago
Have you tried OpenBCI? http://openbci.com/ http://openbci.com/ It's not standardized - so you'll have to make a headband yourself and choose some electrodes, but it gives you full access to all the signals. And don't worry about the 250/125Hz limitation, it can be quite easily hacked to write to SD with much better sampling rate.
- comboy 10y ago
  Haven't heard of it. Looks quite promising. Price for the board doesn't seem to be too bad either given the ADC used. Definitely not something to sleep in, but could be an interesting time sink. Have you? And did you maybe do any nouroon like experiments with some other devices?
  - alxd_org 10y ago
    Sadly, not many. I'm doing a lot of other things, being a front end developer full-time ;) I've played with OpenBCI and with some friends we tried to make it save signals with 1kHz sampling rate. No big-scale experiments so far. Two days ago I checked out Myo on a friend born without a hand, with some hopes to create a simple interface based on her "phantom limb" gestures (she has full forearm with normal enough muscles). Sadly, Myo doesn't allow access to raw EMG signal - and my idea is to create Myo-like open hardware electrode boards to connect with OpenBCI and get some serious signals. EDIT: Regarding OpenBCI - it's open hardware, you can make it yourself for ~under $100 if I'm right.
    - mattkrause 10y ago

aresant 10y ago

Amazon marketplace, kickstarter, and etsy have unleashed a FIREHOSE of pseudo-medical products (And other consumer products) that review systems and regulators are just not equipped to handle. A startup that I wish would happen would be a truly NON biased review organization - eg consumer reports but for the internet age. Not just a consumer reports as digital first but an organization that is able to respond to the deluge of new products & product claims we see as consumers. We were recently trying to buy a foam mattress and immediately got sucked into this huge vortex of misinformation to the point that I just gave up. On the one side you have "mommy bloggers" yelling "tempurpedic offgasses give you CANCER!" and linking to a group of similar non-scientific studies. On the other end is a group that says "latex is the only all natural foam!!!!" but then links to amazon products made in Thailand / etc full of mispellings / no oversight / etc. Or the recent expose of how truffle oils (1) don't actually contain truffles. It's insanity! Clearly the FTC isn't the solution @ this point to oversee consumer protection. (1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453103

jameslk 10y ago
I'm actually working on exactly this currently. It's called Praisee. We're trying to focus just on the review and product decision making side of things, with a heavy emphasis on community, trust and personalization. Amazon is not a reviews service, nor is YouTube, yet this is where people turn. Nobody else seems to be taking the issue seriously, so we are. The hardest part of building something like this is the chicken and egg problem, which is why I don't think there exists a good service for this yet. It's actually really hard to find a group of trustable product reviewers who stay engaged. People don't buy reviewable things that often, so you need another hook to get them to come back and sustain the ecosystem. This has been the hardest part of getting traction for our startup. We're working hard on the problem. Hopefully you'll hear more about us soon.
- Mathnerd314 10y ago
  > It's actually really hard to find a group of trustable product reviewers who stay engaged. There's a ton of bloggers and paid reviewers: http://www.productreviewmom.com/2013/11/how-to-become-product-review-blogger.html http://www.productreviewmom.com/2013/11/how-to-become-produc.... All you need is a way to aggregate the one or two complaints / solid facts per review while filtering out all the fluff promotion verbiage. Mining truth, in other words.

BatFastard 10y ago

Is there any data on the lucid dreaming aspect of NeuroOn? What percentage of people have lucid dreaming using it? Are those people experienced lucid dreamer already? Just this aspect alone is enough to gain my interest. Also how is it for side sleepers? Ever since my motorcycle accident I can only sleep on my side.

alxd_org 10y ago
There is no data that I know of, haven't heard about any papers from NeuroOn, they aren't very fond of whitepapers. As to real science on the topic, you can check http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012001614 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012... As someone who used NeuroOn I can't see anything wrong with using it sleeping on the side. It's still uncomfortable (to me), but it's not a deal-breaker.