Hacker News Reader

Comment by alxd_org | Hacker News Reader

If you have any questions about my blogpost or NeuroOn experiment story, I'll be happy to address them.

I have been already notified that I may have misinterpreted actigraphy publications I cited - I'll look into that tomorrow and gladly update the post with my findings :)

View on HN

my question is why do you make false assertions such as this:

"it could try to wake the user, resulting in grogginess and complete lack of energy till the end of the day". you cite source [4], which is the wikipedia article on "sleep inertia" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia

The wikipedia page doesn't say you'll have a "complete lack of energy till the end of the day", or anything close to that. it says "Morning sleep inertia may take several hours to dissipate" and "Sleep inertia is the impaired cognitive performance immediately upon awakening, which decays over tens of minutes", and "In the majority of cases, morning sleep inertia is experienced for 15 to 30 minutes after waking".

so my question is, whose idea was it to embellish using the phrases "complete lack of energy" and "for the rest of the day" ?

Thank you for pointing that out, I will update it in a moment.

I've written a dozen versions of this article trying to accommodate different readers, including non-technical startup community. One of the main functions of NeuroOn is its alarm clock, which promises to "always wake you up in the best moment", which seems not to be true in ~31% of cases.

When I used direct wording about "sleep inertia", my test readers with no background in sleep science just said "Meh, it's better than without the mask anyway, isn't it?".

It's an honest mistake on my part, which only shows how hard science communication really is - and how hard is to choose a language in debunking bold claims.

Did you get paid to do this?

As I wrote at the very bottom, it's the opposite - I paid for the lab myself.

I had huge hopes for NeuroOn - similar to what some people hoped for with Myo Armband - to finally have some customer grade EEG / EOG available for hacking and playing with.

When I realized that the company doesn't have a prototype working as they claimed - or at least won't show it to anybody and don't have any whitepapers, I got really irritated. There was nobody to properly debunk them. Journalists don't have the knowledge, researchers won't be able to publish that, most hackers won't be able to communicate the message properly.

So I decided to do an experiment myself, as open as possible, for everyone to recalculate and prove me wrong if I am.

Do you know the accuracy of other sleep tracking devices such as fitness bands?

It seems that I've made a mistake with comparing NeuroOn sleep stage detection accuracy with actigraphy, which only measures sleeping/not-sleeping states. I'm going to correct that in a second.

You are probably looking for https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20374444

Reply on news.ycombinator.com