What if an easily portable device could improve sleep quality through sound stimuli? This is the experiment carried out by Swiss researchers from the Polytechnic School of Zurich.
- Researchers have developed a wearable device that plays specific sounds to improve deep sleep.
- According to the first clinical study, the tool would be effective… but not for everyone.
With age, the quality of sleep tends to decrease and “deep sleep” is disturbed. In a way, the opposite of the expression “sleep like a baby”! To improve this specific phase of sleep known (in medical jargon) as “sleep without rapid eye movements”, Swiss researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) carried out a clinical trial to test a new device.
It is a portable device called “SleepLoop”, designed to emit sounds into the ears (via earphones) during the deep sleep phase. The object has a headband equipped with electrodes and a microchip, whose role is to continuously measure the cerebral activity of the sleeping person.
The collected data is analyzed in real time and autonomously thanks to the microchip using personalized software. As soon as the sleeper shows slow waves (signs of deep sleep), the system triggers a short auditory signal, which is characterized by a small “click”.
The fact of receiving this sound would allow the organism to synchronize the neuronal cells and to reinforce the action of the slow waves. Of course, SleepLoop has been designed in such a way that the person wearing the headphones is not woken up by these sounds!
Half-hearted efficiency
The first trial was conducted with 16 participants aged 60 to 80, who used SleepLoop directly at home. The volunteers wore the device every night for a total of four weeks. The auditory stimulation was administered every night for two weeks only, without the participants knowing when exactly.
Published in the journal CommunicationsMedicine, the results seem encouraging. “It worked very well. We had surprisingly little data loss and participants found the device user-friendly.“, explains Caroline Lustenberger, who led the study.
But if the experience proved conclusive in terms of familiarization with the object, not all the participants expressed the same sensitivity to sound stimuli. “Some people generally reacted well to stimuli and showed clearly improved slow waves, while others showed no reaction, regardless of their day-to-day well-being.n,” observes Caroline Lustenberger.
The researchers will therefore use this data to optimize the effectiveness of SleepLoop, so that it benefits as many people as possible.
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