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Zeo Sleep Monitor, does it work? ( not a pitch)
I keep seeing this on TV, now on the sidebar of this site. So I took a look at it and am wondering what the thoughts of forum members are about it. Obviously, the sensor that goes on the forehead will be an issue for masks with the part that rests there
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jon on
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thanks - can you explain - Do you mean that the last 2 cycles are most important -why? and in what way? also do you mean cycles # 3&4 and that I should make sure not to skip REM #4 due to lack of time sleeping - I'm very interested to know what add'l benefits this 4th cycle has. - thx
Monday night – I slept 8 hrs and had the following 4 REM cycles : 11:55pm (15 min), 1:35am (40 min), 3:40 (50 min), 5:25 am (20min)
Sunday night – total sleep 6 ½ hours, 4 REM cycles: 1:00am (15 min), 2:45 (30 min), 4:25am (30 min), 5:55am (25 min)
Sat night – terrible night sleep <4hrs sleep – 2 REM Cycles 4:50 (25 min), 6:20 (45 min)
Basically, I'm getting 3 cycles, and 4 REM cycles if I'm lucky -as you mentioned - It's cool to see the #'s and see that I go into REM about every 2 hours.
I see the benefit in this in knowing how long and frequent my REM and deep sleep cycles are. What are the differences in benefits of deep sleep to REM sleep?
Rock Hinkle said:@derek, Ok I have a couple of questions after reading the Vogue article. These questions may have been answered before.
Why is the Zeo being billed as a sleep coach? If it is not a learning machine what could it possibly teach us? Just giving us a score is not enough if the user does not understand why their score is low or how to raise it.
@Jon, From what I see your problems lie in your sleep hygeine. 5-6 hours of sleep is not enough. It is not just about getting REM sleep. You have to complete consecutive cycles that include all stages of sleep. One stage of sleep is no more or less important then any other. At 5-6 hours you are lucky to get 4 cycles when you need 5-6 at least. It is these last 2 cycles that give us the most REM sleep. It is very important to get quality sleep, but no more important than getting enough sleep.
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Permalink Reply by Derek@Zeo on
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You stole my fire, Jeff ;)
Jon - we're going to have a blog post up soon that discusses sleep architecture in greater depth. The URL is blog.myzeo.com if you are interested. In the mean time, I can point you to another great resource where you can learn more about sleep cycles and the different stages... It's Harvard's sleep website called "Healthy Sleep" and the page you'd be interested in is here: http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/science (launch the 'sleep lab' interactive and dig in).
A quicker (and much less interactive) explanation of Deep and REM sleep is here: http://www.myzeo.com/pages/66_the_power_of_deep_and_rem.cfm
To emphasize Jeff's point, keeping a consistent schedule and, in particular, keeping a consistent rise time and going to bed when you are tired can work wonders. Step 4 of our '7 Steps to Sleep Fitness' email program is all about tackling this, with tips to improve your chances for success....
Which brings me back to Rock's question - why is Zeo being referred to as a sleep 'coach'? You said: "Just giving us a score is not enough if the user does not understand why their score is low or how to raise it." and that's exactly what we try to do in two ways...
1) Zeo enables you to 'do it yourself'. By giving you the tools (both Zeo at your bedside and online journal) to track your sleep patterns over an extended amount of time, you can actually see what factors are impacting your sleep the most (via the online tools) or whether certain lifestyle tweaks/changes are working for you. Understanding yourself better can help you find better sleep.
2) You can receive personal guidance with the '7 Steps to Sleep Fitness' email based coaching program. It takes your data and information about you from surveys to provide you with relevant information and to recommend tips that'll help you sleep better. We developed this program over the course of several months with the assistance of some incredible sleep experts and we feel that it really anchors Zeo in its ability to provide true guidance and "coaching."
I'm loving the dialogue and hope this is answering some questions.
Hope everyone has a great weekend!
-Derek @ Zeo
[derek@myzeo.com]
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thank you both - great info.
I was planning on sleeping late tomorrow (till 11am) to catch up, but it seems that I'm better off keeping my wake time at 7:10am
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A couple of observations of the Zeo
(1) One nice thing of the zeo is that it substituted my rough estimations, with the unfortunate truth - namely I thought that I get about 10 hours of sleep Friday night and 6-7 hours nightly during the rest of the week. But the zeo shows me that my total avg (excl. Friday) of sleep is only 5 hours of sleep! Worthwhile info.
(2) As mentioned I tried to get "normal" sleep this week and to try out the smart-alarm feature.
Sunday morning I slept 6 hours, smart alarm woke me up- I didn't get up out of bed though, but I felt fine during the day.
Monday morning the smart alarm again woke me up earlier than my rise time (by about 1/2 hour I think) however this time I felt terrible, as in it feels like I have a headache in the temple area of my eyes. And I fel like I'm sleep walking through the day ( I don't drink coffee/caffeine to wake me up). Granted I didn't wake up at the smart alarm (6:45) instead kinda went back to daze out and woke up at 7:15 - nonetheless, had I woken up at 7:15 I would have had 7 hours of sleep (a lot for me), now I'm walking around in a daze w/ this lack of sleep headache.
(3) Deep sleep - my zeo shows that I get about 1 hour of deep sleep /night- what is normal?
(4) Cycles - someone mentioned above that I need to set a fixed wake time so that my body will learn this and maximize my REM cycles around it. My question is that wouldn't the smart-alarm feature ruin that. i.e. if I set my alarm for 7:15 on day #1,but the smart alarm wakes me at 6:45 as that's when my REM cycle ended. and ditto for day #2,3... wouldn't my body now assume that 6:45 is my wake time and pattern my REM around that. However if I didn't use the smart alarm and instead awoke at 7:45 every morning, wouldn't my body learn this and maximize my REM utilizing the add'l 1/2 hour per day so that my REM extended past 6:45am? i.e. isn't the smart alarm conditioning my body to LOSE 1/2 hour of sleep and not REM past 6:45?
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Permalink Reply by RockRpsgt on
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That is a good question Jon. Is there any way to extend the alarm time to wkae you up at the desired time period. I guess what I am asking is if there is anyway to extend it one more cycle, or does the machine choose when to wake you up?
In my personal experience it is not so bad to wake up during REM. We are trained not to wake up our pts in this stage of sleep for many reasons including personal safety. Some people come up swinging out of REM sleep. REM is actually a pretty light sleep due to the high brain activity. For this reason you should wake up from this stage pretty light on your feet. Whereas if you woke up during stage 2, or especially stage 3 you would be very groggy. I guess what I am trying to say is that if you took the extra 1 1/2 hours of sleep that you would be better off even if you woke up during a Rem cycle. If i had a choice in the matter I would prefer to get up towards the end of a REM cycle.
Jon said:A couple of observations of the Zeo
(1) One nice thing of the zeo is that it substituted my rough estimations, with the unfortunate truth - namely I thought that I get about 10 hours of sleep Friday night and 6-7 hours nightly during the rest of the week. But the zeo shows me that my total avg (excl. Friday) of sleep is only 5 hours of sleep! Worthwhile info.
(2) As mentioned I tried to get "normal" sleep this week and to try out the smart-alarm feature.
Sunday morning I slept 6 hours, smart alarm woke me up- I didn't get up out of bed though, but I felt fine during the day.
Monday morning the smart alarm again woke me up earlier than my rise time (by about 1/2 hour I think) however this time I felt terrible, as in it feels like I have a headache in the temple area of my eyes. And I fel like I'm sleep walking through the day ( I don't drink coffee/caffeine to wake me up). Granted I didn't wake up at the smart alarm (6:45) instead kinda went back to daze out and woke up at 7:15 - nonetheless, had I woken up at 7:15 I would have had 7 hours of sleep (a lot for me), now I'm walking around in a daze w/ this lack of sleep headache.
(3) Deep sleep - my zeo shows that I get about 1 hour of deep sleep /night- what is normal?
(4) Cycles - someone mentioned above that I need to set a fixed wake time so that my body will learn this and maximize my REM cycles around it. My question is that wouldn't the smart-alarm feature ruin that. i.e. if I set my alarm for 7:15 on day #1,but the smart alarm wakes me at 6:45 as that's when my REM cycle ended. and ditto for day #2,3... wouldn't my body now assume that 6:45 is my wake time and pattern my REM around that. However if I didn't use the smart alarm and instead awoke at 7:45 every morning, wouldn't my body learn this and maximize my REM utilizing the add'l 1/2 hour per day so that my REM extended past 6:45am? i.e. isn't the smart alarm conditioning my body to LOSE 1/2 hour of sleep and not REM past 6:45?
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Some recent thoughts from this week's usage. I've kept to a normal (for me) sleeping schedule of 6-7 hours nightly, keeping regular hours.
(a) I like the cascading, sweet alarm - better than my prior obnoxious beep
(b) The fact that you can't edit your data - really ruins things when you look at averages over a week or month. As hour(s) spent lying awake unable to fall asleep are counted as REM sleep - which makes the averages wrong/meaningless.
(c) I really would like more info on whether it's beneficial to lose 30 minutes of sleep in order to awaken at the end of a REM cycle - especially when I get so little sleep to begin with it becomes more important to know the value of losing part of it. Of course, you can change the window of time it will wake you up - i.e. you can tell it to only wake you up after a REM if it's w/in 5 minutes of scheduled wake time. But the question is the same, I need to know how valuable it is to wake up after REM to know how much of a window I should leave.
(d) I see from my graph, that during my REM cycles, I may have 1 small interval where it says that I went out of REM into light sleep. e.g. REM from 6:00am - 6:20am, Light Sleep 6:20 - 6:25, REM 6:25 - 6:35 - i.e. it could have been one long REM cycle where something temporarily disturbed my sleep for a few minutes, and then I went back into REM. My point is that if I had set the smart alarm to wake me at 6:50am with a 30min window, the clock would check on me at 6:20 and assume that I finished my REM cycle and wake me up.
I wondered this when I saw one morning how the smart alarm woke me up at the point when my REM changed to light sleep, however the REM cycle was short so I'm guessing that I was in fact still in the middle of a REM cycle, with some brief disturbance (RFM kid?)
My suggestion would be to change it from waking you up immediately after a REM to 10-15 min after a REM cycle so that it's more certain that you have in fact completed a REM cycle (or perhaps (though less likely) it could look at the length of the REM cycle to determine if it was a completed one)
In short - I like the Zeo very much, however for me personally, not being able to distinguish (or at least edit out) time spent awake trying to fall asleep from being recorded as REM ruins it's usefullness.
And I need more info re: the smart alarm - as this is the reason I bought the Zeo, but I don't yet see any difference by waking up earlier, and perhaps it's made me more tired.
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Oh forgot one very well thought out feature - the headband has magnets on it , so it is VERY easy to attach to the base/charger. Very well designed.
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encountered my first technical problem:
the headband says that it is charging on the clock, however after about 5 minutes of wearing it, it now says that it doesn't have a charge anymore and shuts down - this is new, whereas it was working great before.
I sent in an email to Zeo.
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Very impressive customer service.
I emailed them yesterday (probably closed July 4th)
and this morning (11am) I received an email asking me a few questions to pinpoint if the clock was picking up the signal properly
I responded 11:40am with the info they requested, and received a response at 3:30pm stating that they sent out a replacement and included a return shipping label
Very impressive.
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I received the replacement sensor on Sat. as promised.
Basically - I thought about whether I want to return it, and decided that the smart alarm - doesn't work for me (I get too little sleep to begin with ) but I do find it useful to see my sleep pattern, and with this info can perhaps see the exact amount more sleep I need to get another REM cycle - very beneficial. So I'm going to hold on to it. I haven't tried out the coaching - guess I should. Also I don't see how 70% of users report getting 1 hour more sleep with the Zeo (if anything I've lost sleep with the smart alarm) - not saying it's wrong, just curious to see for myself how that is.
Once I can optimize my sleep to get that extra cycle, and get into a stable pattern - I'll probably resell it on eBay as it's an expensive item if I don't need it, and I don't feel great wearing anything electronic so close to my brain and so often (that's almost 200 hours per month).
Hope the info helped people.
Jon
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Permalink Reply by Matt on
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Thanks Jon for putting out the effort and giving us your honest thoughts. All the best in your quest for good sleep.
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