When you get a Zeo, you also get a Sleep Wheel, a little tool that shows one's age-based range and average for ZQ, different sleep stages, and total sleep time. 

We specifically created the sleep wheel to help you contextualize all the data you see every morning; otherwise, it would all be just a bunch of numbers that our brains would file it away under "useless information" and be done with it.

Of course, if you give a Zeolot some data, they are going to ask questions.  And many of those questions will be for more data.  :)

I'm wondering if there's more detail on sleep + age data. For instance, it would be nice to know the averages & standard deviations in addition to the ranges.--Briano

The sleep wheel is categorized by age [but] we do not know the average age of the 10,000 people sampled...it certainly seems to indicate that people in their 40s are the "average" users. I would caution people from using the implied age related data on that wheel as targets. My personal view is that it was gathered from a pool of people that are known to live in a suboptimal lifestyle yet I see people saying "hey I am within the expected range".--TheFuture

The Science of Sleep

The data in the Sleep Wheel itself came from a massive study done in 2004 that looked at how sleep changed over age.  The findings themselves matched what sleep scientists thought, namely that over the course of our lifetime, our amounts of Deep and REM sleep naturally goes down and our time in Light sleep and Wake increases.

Being scientists ourselves, we had to test it.  With Zeo, we could start to tackle the pesky question of whether or not being in a lab significantly alters the findings.

Gentlemen, Behold!

Remember DOZER?  We went to this handy database, selected several thousand Zeo uses who had at least 28 nights of data apiece, and then sorted the whole mess by age, gender, sleep phases, Total Sleep Time, ZQ, bedtime and rise time. When we compared that set with the data from the Sleep Wheel...

..... it looked remarkably similar.

In scientific terms, this is what's called a big win, not only for us but also because it gave additional validation to earlier sleep research.  We even ended up presenting our findings at the 2010 American Academy of Sleep Medicine's APSS Conference.

Great.  Now where do I fit in?

We also looked at the overall range, and noticed that about 2/3rds of these Zeolots fell within one standard deviation.  That is, this average is actually representative of a number of actual humans at any given time.  I myself fall within that standard deviation for the 17-29 age group.

If you still don't see yourself in that data set, don't worry.  Remember, about 1/3rd of the Zeo users we pulled from DOZER fell outside of this range.  Some people got more Deep and REM, some got less; some woke up more than others, while others fell asleep faster.  As far as we--and sleep science--can tell, everyone's sleep is different. 

And that's okay.