Perchance to dream

Written by Larry Schneider
Thursday, 12 November 2009 01:00

Dear Larry,

I saw an ad for a technology product called Zeo that claims to help you sleep better. Do you know anything about it? — F.S.

Dear F.S.,

Thomas Edison felt sleep was a waste of time and relied on four hours a night. Albert Einstein insisted he needed nine hours of sleep for his mind to function at peak capacity. You and I would probably be pretty happy if we could consistently manage seven hours every night.

By and large, Americans today don’t sleep well. Sleep studies indicate that at least half the population doesn’t get the eight hours (on average) that’s recommended for most adults.

Several years ago, I spent a night in a sleep lab to try and find out why my sleep was so erratic. The truth is, they should be called awake labs because sleep is the last thing you can expect to get when you have scores of wires and electrodes glued to your body.

But what if you could analyze how well you sleep with an unobtrusive, wireless headband? That’s the concept behind the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach (Myzeo.com), developed by a couple of sleepless Brown University students. While you sleep, you wear a soft, elastic, lightweight headband that positions a built-in sensor against your forehead — it’s actually not as uncomfortable as it sounds. The sensor takes measurements throughout the night such as how long it takes for you to fall asleep, the amount of time you spend in REM or “dream” sleep (essential for memory), deep sleep (good for everything else), light sleep, and perhaps most familiar, the number of times you wake up and stay awake. Every five minutes, these measurements are wirelessly transmitted to a fancy Zeo alarm clock next to your bed. Periodically, you take the data from the Zeo, feed it into your computer (via the included card reader), and start analyzing. All this for $249.

My wife wondered if you really need a $249 device to tell you you had a lousy night’s sleep. Perhaps not. But the Zeo can help in other ways. How does your sleep measure up with or without your pet poodle as a bedmate? What if you skip that one glass of wine? Or drink it every night? What if you went to bed an hour earlier or an hour later? And does the television in your bedroom really mess with your sleep cycle?

Granted, you can probably answer many of these questions by reading a couple of library books. And most of us already know that alcohol, caffeine, heat, light, noise, and stress will play havoc with our sleep. We’ve tried counting, mental relaxation, soft music, fancy mattresses and Ambien.

But if you’re the type of person who exercises more when you’re paying for a personal trainer or loves crunching numbers during the day, perhaps a Zeo at night will help put your mind at rest.

This is Larry Schneider, logging off.

Larry Schneider is the owner of Accent on Computers, a Greenwich-based consulting firm serving PCs and Macs. Call 625-7575 or visit Accentoncomputers.com for more information or send an e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .