If we look at what is needed from other applications, websites, and devices we will see where we need to talk to others that have them and we may get them to implement changes to support our product.
If we start with say Dietary Intake. Dietary Intake (D.I.) includes what we eat, drink, and supplements we take. Keeping this in mind we then need to start by defining what we know affects sleep. Some foods assist in falling and staying asleep while others do the opposite. Once we give this information to a D.I. partner they can make changes in what they record and provide for our track also.
One of the things we have to keep in mind is that we do not know everything that affects sleep and that for each person it may very in degree. That being said importing every bit of information we can to look for patterns is still essential to what we are doing. Sharing anatomized data with the research community is needed to further studies in these avenues.
My personal preference for D.I. tracking applications is MyFitnessPal (MFP). They provide many of the things we need to see to start with, but it could still use improvement. If MFP changed a part of their tracking and display to include all the FDA recommended daily allowances. By tracking these we can see both what and how much we take in and then see if it affects our sleep. Diets should also be taken into account. Different diets require different things and they affect our body in different ways. If you are on a diet the application should have a way to set it to automatically track if what you are eating is in the diet parameters and automatically update itself as needed to reflect that.
Having said all the above those who are providing D.I. tracking should also look at what other communities/areas of our life needs to be reflected in their program.
Talking with innovators in the field of sleep and dreams there is a need for not only quantified self, but understood self. An example of one of the innovators who is working toward the understood self is the creators of Shadow. Shadow is on Kickstarter and is a step in the right direction for understanding our dreams. Keeping that in mind integration with the many other aspects of who and what we are only helps build that understanding. On the subject of sleep just a few of the things that affect our sleep is our health. Our health falls under what I like to call three categories. 1) Physical health - some of the aspects of physical health is our dietary intake (i.e. food, drink, drugs, etc.), exercise (i.e. flexibility, endurance, strength, agility, etc.); 2) Mental health - mental health is reflected in some of the following areas state (i.e. angry, happy, depressed, etc.), illusions/delusions (i.e. I can not do it, life is unfair, etc.), dreams (i.e. reflect our mental health, our desires, our fears, etc.); 3) Spiritual health - this one is a personal point of view for everyone (i.e. religion, metaphysical, paranormal, overall happiness with life, etc.) These all tie into each other in a supporting system that when one is not healthy it affects the others. To better understand this a strategic alliance of personal mobile health applications, websites, and devices needs to happen to with visualizations and analytics. Being able to take anatomized data with the needed demographic tags to make the data relevant in analytics will help with this understanding in a well visualized display. We are on the verge of a data correlation and pattern recognition revolution, evolution, and innovation that will rocket our understanding of ourselves and our environment like at no other time.
A lot of what I have talked about has been the objective observation of our body and environment to help with getting better sleep. What I have not talked about is the subjective side and some other related objective ways to monitor the effectiveness of our sleep.
First letās talk about the subjective side. This is best described by a series of questions designed to evaluate how you feel and how your sleep is affecting you through out your day. By using these questions with a scalling system of how severe the effects are, how often, how long, and when they happen we will begin to see the picture of our sleep come into focus. I plan on posting some links to examples of these questions.
Next there are some other objective ways of seeing how effective our sleep has been. These are some of the examples: doing some math problems when first waking up, answering multiple choice questions, hand eye coordination games, and speech games. For these to be effective measurements there needs to enough of them that we can not mesmerize them and do them by rote memory. By comparison of speed and accuracy from day to day and over time we can see how effective our sleep has been.
Think about every time you have felt tired. Some of the questions that you have to ask yourself are (1) Am I sleepy because I did not get enough sleep? (2) Am I sleepy because I have run out of energy? Now here is the hard thing to understand about these two questions. They may not really be that different from each other and the answer may really be the same without you even knowing it. Keep in mind that our physical body and our psychological mind both need different amounts of sleep to work at our best, but that is because each uses it in a different way. The difference in how much one needs compared to the other is still not really known and it seems that it is different for each person. Having said that the reason I have brought up these two simple questions is because your energy levels and sleep also tie into your dietary intake, physical fitness, and mental health. Keep in mind that the things you ingest power you throughout the day, but your bodies ability to use it efficiently is your physical health and the things that give you stress or make you happy and how much of them are affecting you make up your mental health.
Now your mental health is not just things like not being crazy. We all have things going on in our lives that affect our mental stability from any given moment. These things are a combination of short, medium, and long term things that both make us happy or cause us stress. The reason that this is important is because they affect how quickly we can fall asleep and what our dreams will be like. The better our life and less stress the easier it is for us to fall asleep and the less likely it is that our dreams will interrupt our sleep.
With all these things affecting our sleep the questions we have to have in a survey should fall under many parts. One part is questions about how tired you are throughout your day. A second part is about your sleeping environment and sleeping habits. Third is a part about your exercise and eating habits.
When making a APP to help you manage your sleep there should be questions about these things that you have to answer on a regular basis to continually help evaluate your sleep health.
I have known about Zeo for a long time and had wanted to purchase their sleep manager, but did not have the money. Recently my finances have improved and I went looking for them and was very disappointed to see they had gone out of business.
They were always a very quiet company. I never knew that they made a version that was quite inexpensive and worked with a smart phone. I have recently acquired their mobile sleep manager thru ebay. I am delighted with it.
I can understand Sethās need for something much simpler. But there are those of us that need much more. I know what time I go to bed and wake each day. That does nothing for my sleep issues. If I sleep under 9 hours, I feel crappy. Sometimes even sleeping 9 hours, I still feel crappy. But I never feel well sleeping under 9 hours. For people like me, the solution is not the number of hours. Two days in a row I can go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time yet one day I feel like crap and the other I am rested.
I am bummed that the only product that was out there that could give me some insight into my sleep is no longer made! Iāve only had my Zeo mobile for about a week and I can see correlations. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to know how to fix the issues. I seem to get plenty of deep sleep. But REM sleep is hard to come by. I typically donāt get any REM sleep until after having been asleep for 6 to 8 hours. Then REM starts. On mornings when I feel very crappy, Iāve gotten no REM sleep at all.
So is there a market for Zeoās product? Well, if there are other people like myself that struggle with sleep issues on a daily basis, the answer is YES!
I read an article about why Zeo went out of business. And I can understand that they didnāt have the right business model. I donāt know much about running a business. But I know a lot about being a consumer! So Iāll give my two cents for what it is worth.
Advertising! If people donāt know you exist, they wonāt purchase your products or services. You need to show them why they need your products and services. Some may only need products. A smaller group would benefit from some services.
Services. This type of product is a one shot deal. People donāt keep buying more and more. Maybe a new headband periodically. But you arenāt going to make enough money on that. There will be people with significant sleep issues that would like some sort of services. The trick is finding the right services to offer. I would think youād need to have one time services and ongoing services. For example, Iām baffled as to why I sleep in ālight sleepā for hours and hours before getting any REM sleep. A one time service where an actual person that knows about sleep issues looked at your data and provided you feedback would be good for this type of situation.
Take advantage of other products! I own a fitbit. The fitbit can track sleep. It would give Seth all the information he needs. He doesnāt need a Zeo Sleep Manager. He needs a fitbit. But there are people with fitbits that have other health concerns like diet and sleep. Fitbit allows you to connect up with various sites for diet related things (as well as other health related things). If Zeo integrated with another major product like fitbit, people would see that as a plus. Especially if they got fitbit to integrate them into their dashboard. Zeo would then get known to more people and more people would be likely to buy their products.
I would love to see Zeo come back. Or someone else that wishes to take over the product. I wish the best of luck to anyone pursuing the continuation of this product.
I have been thinking about the business model for a while now. I think it needs to be set up as a multI-tier revenue generator. Tier one would be based off of a free application that works just on the phone, itās sensors, and in application data input with advertising as the revenue maker. Tier two would be a paid for application through a subscription be it using the Zeo, other devices, applications, and website services for input of data and analysis. The third tier would be to sell raw anonymous demographic tagged data for others to use for analysis. A fourth tier would be the Zeo itself. Processed data for the use of Zeo would be used to improve products and services, but would be punishable for proof of product results. I have no idea yet of pricing, because it is fluid over time with the changing market.
The first tier of the business model should be the downloadable application. I said it should be free with limited usability. Keeping that in mind it should provide the best use of whatever device it is downloaded on. So, that includes the combination of hardware, operating system, and the application. Any information that is external to the device: dietary intake, physical fitness, mental state, etc. would need to be entered via the device and the application. Now this does not mean that this side of the application should be short changed. If anything this side of the applications is just as important as any other of the tiers.
The second tier is the subscription. This would tie in the website and the full power of the Zeo team. The included kind of things are the analytics and automated input. One very important aspect of this tier should be the ability to use any devices that the manufactures will allow direct access too.
Automated Input:
Physical: any applications, devices, and website services that can have information imported from them for dietary intake, medications, and exercise.
Mental: any applications, devices, and website services that can have information imported from them for dreams, cognitive behavior, (short, middle, long) term stressors and things that make us happy.
Environmental:any applications, devices, and website services that can have information imported from them for home, driving, work, or any other areas that the person who may be in through out their life.
Analytics: simply put any correlations that can be found between any of the data point that are imported.
Keeping in mind that analytics are important for finding correlations. These correlations are important for a number of reasons beyond finding things out about ourselves, but to also include improving the Zeo products, helping the clients, other communities, etc. in the third tier of the business model.
That fourth tier is important, but keep in mind that to make it worth while it needs to beat out the others on the market in price verses quality. That way the clients will want to us the Zeo device instead of any others, but the others should not be prevented from being used. On top of that using other products to their fullest requires constant evaluation and improvement of the applications and services.
Although I have not stated a fifth tier there are a few things we mush keep in mind. One of which is that if done properly is the ability to tie this into the doctors who are taking care of the clients. I know that this is about providing power to the client, self understanding, but also helping everyone that can be helped.
One of the things that I can not say enough about this blog is that it is not just about the title. It is about what other people who want to get into the personal mobile health business can learn from these concepts. I do want the Zeo to come back and this is the only way I can do my part being who I am. Please feel free to poke holes in my thoughts or provide supporting ideas that can be shared with everyone. Help me turn this in to a discussion and not a monolog.
I had a thought based on two things. One is the need for more levels of revenue and so I thought about a tier five of a business model. It would go hand in hand with some emerging ideas around personal cloud computing and maintaining control of your data. If the same software that is used to do the data crunching on all the given data sets I have thus far talked about to monitor our health and improve our sleep were sold to those who wanted it then it would make a fifth tier. The only problem I see is that to make it work while for both side the seller and the buyer it would have to do a lot and yet it would have to cost a pretty penny. Having your own personal server with cloud computing capabilities within your network and maybe Zeo providing a back up service for those would provide even a sixth tier to the business model. It would also keep your information yours. I know that to keep improving the hardware and software along with our understanding not only of our individual self, but of humans and our environment I would sill like t to keep the ability to share data. Keeping the same idea of removing personal information and adding demographic tags to it so that analysis could be done and the data shared would be great.
The Alarm continued - thinking about an alarm that knows your sleep it should also be able to suggest when you should go to sleep based on your sleep profile. Your sleep profile should be about how long it takes you to fall asleep, the different stages of sleep, how well rested you were, and how long it takes you to wake up. With these peaceās of information along with a time you need to get up the application should be able to tell you when your best time to go to sleep is to get the sleep you need to be at your best. With each days data it should be able to do this better and better. Along these lines it should also look for a pattern of change and tag this so that you the user can try to figure out what is happening.
Pebble Watches are an example of how watches are starting to move in the right direction. Seeing as how you can right a program to run on the watch and work through your phone companies that help you track your fitness through actigraphy could use the Pebble to do it. The best way would to tie it in with the subscription side of things that way they are continuing to make money to afford to keep up with the programing and hardware changes. This is an example of how I would tie things into the tier two that I have described before.
As a programmer who was sad to see Zeo go, Iām glad you are doing this. I have a couple ideas after several years of using the bedside unit. Iād like to throw in with the rest of your collection:
The bedside unit could use a ambient temperature sensor. The temperature of your room has a big effect on sleep quality and the Zeo could find the ideal room temperature by correlating temp to ZQ score over time.
The unit needs an ambient light sensor so it can detect if it is too bright inside your room at night. We know light negatively affects a userās sleep.
The unit should auto-dim its LCD display at night, either based on time of day or the ambient light sensor. It is too bright at night and too dim during the day. It should get brighter in the morning once the sun is up.
The alarm music gradually gets louder (a nice feature) but then starts over and goes quiet again after a few minutes. I have overslept a few times because of that. I consider it a bug.
An audio jack in the unit would be nice for plugging into external speakers. I added one to mine just to get it loud enough to wake me.
I have a bright lamp that simulates sunrise. I wish I could tie the Zeo in with it so that it could be automatically turned on an hour before the alarm goes off. Today I use an outlet timer. The zeo having knowledge that a sunrise was being simulated might be useful also.
Have the alarm automatically shut off when I put the headband on the dock. I shouldnāt have to press the two extra buttons to disable it.
Related to #7, if I get up before the alarm and set the headband on the dock, it should disable the alarm as well. Itās really annoying when I hop in the shower and hear the thing start going off.
Have a temperature sensor in the headband to correlate body temp with sleep quality. I think there is research correlating the circadian rhythm to body temperature peak.
WiFi sync of data would be really nice.
In an ideal universe, the Zeo would download periodic updates over WiFi. These would include patterns in sleep data derived from the global user data set. They would act like diagnostic codes in your car. If the Zeo sees certain patterns in a userās data, it would automatically warn them, either by email and/or a message on the LCD.
On January 2nd, 2014 I talked about the Zeo to my sleep doctor. All these years in, and she had no idea these existed and even looked somewhat upset hearing the company went under. Sleep studies today are a nightmare with wires everywhere and they cost a fortune. I realize getting the Zeo classified as a medical device is expensive, but every sleep clinic in the country would buy them if they could just send it home with a patient for a month. My sleep study was $3000 after insurance took the brunt of it. A $300 Zeo as a pre-test is nothing.
A microphone in the bedside unit could detect noise level in your room during the night. In addition to the ZQ score there could be an EQ score (Environment quality), based on temp, noise, and light disturbances. You could also see what times during the night they appeared.
Lastly, Iād love to implement a few of these myself if the source code were available. Any chance of the firmware being open sourced in the future?
The LPC2138FBD64 chip in the bedside unit looks like it could handle plenty of extra features, and the serial port at least opens things up to custom peripherals being designed.
I agree with all your points and then some. For a company that is looking to replace the Zeo, which a few are with their own product there are other ways. Starting off to keep the price down on their product doing APIās & SDKās that can tie other devices information that they gather into a Zeo replacement works. That gets the foot in the door, but also gives them time to further develop a complete replacement package of their own.
The core question with the Zeo is whether you really need the EEG. Of course having an EEG is nice but it requires you to wear something on your head.
Accelerator measurement devices like the Fitbit are probably not enough. I would however expect a device such as MyBasis or Angel to be able to gather enough data to get meaningful sleep data.
Although a accelerometer works just fine for some aspects of sleep monitoring it does not and can not be as accurate as brain waves. Those are what say we have made it into the different levels of sleep. If you do some looking into sleep you will find that there are more levels than awake, light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep. Most of these have defined levels within each area. Also adding more sensors means getting better data and a better way to define our sleep.
I guess the next thing is that you have to be able to live with whatever monitoring devices you want to use. If you donāt want to wear any of these there are others that do not require you to wear things. If you are looking for a more indepth look into your health, let alone your sleeping health you will need more.