We're busy people and we like to have things a certain way. We want to be able to eat when we need to, work when we have to and sleep when we'd like to. We also want all of these things to be easy to do.
If you suffer from a sleeping disorder such as snoring or sleep apnea, falling asleep can be a real challenge. Snoring is caused when the airways are blocked by either over-relaxed muscles or general congestion. This causes the sound television has taught us so much about. Sleep apnea is more severe in that not only are the airways blocked, but breathing is interrupted several times during the night. You read that right. You just stop breathing. If you suffer from either one of these conditions just the '˜simple' act of falling asleep could be difficult for you.
There are plenty of devices and products on the market to help you cope with the disorder, but what about actually falling asleep? It can be difficult when you're worried about how your disorder will impact your sleep that night or when you're trying to get used to a new device.
In comes this proposed, pretty cool, device:
The fifth annual International Space Apps Challenge which brings together teams from all over the world to try and solve specific NASA challenges is coming to a close. One of the top twenty-five teams has proposed an idea if implemented could relieve us from sleep deprivation problems. Their idea is a device that can help you sleep better called hypnos.”
“My roommate Thomas and I are currently researchers at the Harvard-MIT HST Division & Brigham and Women’s Hospital and both our projects involve a lot of overnight experiments which did cause sleep issues to some extent. I think this initial motivation for hypnos stemmed from this idea that sleep deprivation was affecting our cognitive function on a daily basis.” said Sachin Bhagchandani, one of the team members.
“With Aaron and Gabriel’s help at the NASA Space Apps Challenge happening at the Harvard GSD, we discussed about how although humans have leveraged light and sound in intuitive ways to better our existence by stimulating powerful psychological and corresponding physiological responses through communication or art, we have not given appropriate weight to the merit of using these media as clinical modalities to stimulate tunable physiological responses.” added Sachin.
If that doesn't sound pretty cool you need to read more science fiction. The fact that we are looking into options to essentially plug ourselves into a good night's sleep is pretty amazing.
If you read the article all the way you'll notice that you can vote for the project. If this sounds like something you would like to see become a reality, there's no time like the present to make your voice heard!
Sleep is previous and definitely needed. You don't want to be a zombie for the rest of your life. Wouldn't you like to be able to peacefully fall asleep like they do in the movies?
Yeah, we thought so.
