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How sleep startup Zeo started counting Zs (mobihealthnews.com)
16 points by baran on March 18, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


I have one, love it. Changed my sleep patterns, and, most importantly, I'm able to get by on 5 1/2 - 6 1/2 hours of sleep without waking up groggy.

Prior to MyZeo, if I wanted to wake up refreshed, and relaxed, without any effort, I'd have to get about 7 1/2 hours of sleep and let the sunlight coming in my window wake me up. But, I knew from experience, that depending on how I woke up - I could go for quite a while with about 6 hours of sleep and feel fine all day without that morning struggle to break through that "inertia."

That's the cool part of myZeo - you basically say "Here is a window when I want you to wake me up, but make sure I'm _just_ exiting REM sleep, so i'll wake up refreshed!"

For those that doubt the value of the device, ask yourself what you would pay to :

  A) Get back one hour each day (presuming you are 
     okay getting 6 1/2 hours of sleep a night

  B) Exit sleep refreshed.


I have one and I love it. My doc has never seen one of these, but I hope he learns a bit so that we can have actual data to discuss not my vague "I think I go to bed at midnight and fall asleep in 30 minutes". By the same token I love my WiThings wi-fi body scale - it keeps records automatically.

I love data.


I predict this will fail.

1. Too complicated

2. Too expensive

3. Uncomfortable to wear (especially for stomach sleepers)


Uhm. As a user I feel compelled to comment:

1. It's no more complicated than an alarm clock in a hotel room. Most people can manage that.

2. Depends on what you compare it to. It' about the same price as a game console (and could be as much fun), and is 4 times cheaper than a portable EEG machine (which is the only way to get the same quality of sleep data).

3. I didn't have any problems with it - it's very light.

The only problem for me is that some day I just collapse on the bed and the last thing I think about is putting it on. So I have large gaps in my data. But I have data!

The only problem for the company is that there may be not enough people who care about the data. On the other hand doctors may be slow and reluctant to accept this device's data too, so this leaves not much point for most people in having one of these. It has a potential to end up being a geek toy with limited appeal.


I need to see some data around this before I buy.

Something as simple as... before/after stats of product effectiveness. % users waking refreshed before/after.


I thought I read that there is some dispute over the data.... like the user doesn't own it, can't d/l to excel spreadsheet and you have to use their website and software to analyze and plot the date. The company side steps the issue because they are hoping to monetize the data of 1000's of users. Any thoughts?


Dunno haven't tried downloading data yet. Though all data is on SD card, short of public key crypto I don't see how they can stop me from getting it.




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