As the Research Scientist of Zeo, a big part of my job is to make sure that we keep all our efforts grounded in scientific integrity. This means staying abreast of the latest in scientific thought around sleep to make sure that what we do conforms to the high standards of the people who sleep for a living.

For instance, did you know that:

• Awakenings need to last at least 5 minutes to be remembered upon awakening?
• Anesthesia does not put you to sleep, but puts you in to a sort of reversible coma?

Neat stuff, to be sure--as well as validation for how we measure sleep.  If you think about the first fact, you'd probably remember that Zeo only pays attention to awakenings that are 2 minutes or longer, a confirmation that it's the longer awakenings that we remember.

Go to SLEEP

But where can one go to meet and mingle with other sleep scientists?  Why to SLEEP, the annual meeting of the Association of Professional Sleep Societies (APSS), of course!  It's here that sleep scientists present new studies and information about the wonderful--but complex--state of sleep.

Zeo's been attending--and presenting new sleep data and science--for the last few years and true to form, I came to Sleep 2011 with a little research of my own--with help from gracious Zeo users.

• Fabregas, Objective sleep by age and sex in a large at-home sample (Download PDF)

News Flash: Biological Sex and Age are partly to blame for your poor sleep

Basically, sleep gets worse as we age, and men tend to sleep better than women (sorry, ladies).

If you look at the graphs below, you'll notice that women tend to get the short end of the stick as they get older:  their Total Sleep Time (TST) decreases, they stay awake longer during the night, and get less REM overall.

However, look at the Deep sleep graph:  where men tend to just decline decade after decade, women actually level out in their 50s and may even get a little more than before.

from Fabregas, Objective sleep by age and sex in a large at-home sample

We got all this information by using DOZER (our Data Observations of the Zeo Extraction Registry) which is the largest home-collected sleep database in the world.  All the data was made anonymous--because we do respect user privacy-- and we then looked at the cross-sectional effects of age and biological sex on several measure of sleep quality.

What do you get out of this?  Well, at a basic level, these data sets form the basis for your age and sex comparisons in nightly and weekly reports as well as in the coaching program.  So if you really want to know how you compare to people your age--not lab rats or "sick people" from a lab study--keep uploading your data!  The more data and stats there are from users like you, the better you can assess your own sleep quality.

Lastly,  these data serve to show that Zeo is a valid and sensitive tool for measuring sleep as the data conform nicely to previous reports--always a key thing to have in any science-based field!

Team Zeo, Represent

Of course, I wouldn't be going to a sleep meeting without doing a little plugging for Zeo. But we weren't alone this year--turns out some other folks are starting to catch on to easy sleep phasing in the home.

As always, you can find the original abstracts by taking a look at this year's Abstract Supplement at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM)'s peer reviewed journal website: journalsleep.org.  Just one more way Zeo steers clear from tinfoil hat territory.

• Gumenyuk, et al, Electrophysiological evidence of improvement of the brain mechanism of auditory pre-attentive processing in habitual short sleepers after sleep extension:  Study II

• Curtis, et al, Comparison of an ambulatory sleep-stage recorder with outpatient actigraphy and sleep logs across a wide range of sleep phenotypes

And we got a couple mentions even in projects where Zeo wasn't used:

• Gumenyuk, et al, Electrophysiological evidence of impact on auditory pre-attentive brain mechanism in habitual short sleepers:  Study I

• Popovic, et al, Sleep/Wake classification with head actigraphy

To keep yourself abreast of the latest sleep science, stay tuned to our Facebook page, Twitter Feed, and Google+ page.  We're always posting the latest sleep science news, articles, and findings and how they relate to Zeo, so keep yourself in the know!  It's one way to becoming a better sleep expert yourself.