Wednesday, December 09, 2009

An Upcoming Feature

I've been seeing articles recently about the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach. It's an electronic sensor you wear on a headband that supposedly tracks your sleep patterns during the night and sends the data to a separate collection unit.

There's a slot for an SD card, so it's possible to download the data to the SD card and transfer to a computer.

That's where they got me. I'm not interested in "sleep coaching" or any of that, but I'm very interested in data about how I sleep, and how the quality of my sleep changes under different conditions. For instance, I take Ambien two nights a week (to stave off exhaustion from the other five nights when I don't sleep nearly as well). I take Melatonin on the other nights, and without it, I would hardly sleep at all. I'd like to see how those nights compare, and there are at least a dozen other situations I'd like to compare, too. It also sounded like an interesting short-run series for the blog, and it might even be useful for some of you guys who are crummy sleepers as well.

Plus, and I think I've mentioned this before, I occasionally have incredibly vivid dreams that contain full narratives. They're basically like watching little films, and I love those dreams. If there was any way I could figure out a series of conditions that would be likely to induce them, it would be a huge benefit.

Unfortunately, the unit costs $249 (without guided coaching--with it, it's $399), and while I was curious, I wasn't nearly that curious. So I filed it away.

Last week, though, a new "try it" option was added--a 30-day trial for only $20. That's definitely in my wheelhouse, so I signed up and the unit should be here on Thursday. Hopefully, I'll have some data to compare by the middle of next week.

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