This implanted microchip may one day control your sleep
freethink.com
freethink.com
It isn't just "peptides" and "circadian rhythms". Sleep is about much more than just being unconscious, which why sleeping pills don't solve the problem of sleep, they solve the problem of consciousness.
Sleep is what your brain and body do during the time you are asleep. Just because you're unconscious, doesn't mean you are getting good sleep.
At my company SoundMind we're identifying bursts of brain activity in your deepest sleep called Slow-Wave Oscillations (SWOs). When we detect an SWO, we have a short window in which to stimulate your brain, which causes your SWOs to increase in both power, and the number of slow waves. This results in up to 40% improvement in the performance of deep sleep. This is an improvement to the most important part of sleep, which is why we're starting here. SWOs are responsible for the clearing of Amyloid plaques, memory consolidation, and regulation of hormones such as GH, cortisol, insulin, and prolactin.
If you want to find out more, check us out at https://soundmind.co
My first company was a DARPA R&D contracting firm and at one point we made our own EEG's. We solved some interesting problems but being in a helmet in a war is probably an easier use case than a head band that's comfortable to sleep in... What are you using for electrodes in your prototypes? Do you use an aerogel or the usual synapse paste? I can't imagine a consumer product would work for the later but maybe the former.
The state of the art for my old applications seems to now be micro/nano scale electrodes, from only a quick google. I've been out of the space for a bit shy of a decade so I'm interested to know how far it's come and how you're going to make the product comfortable.
We are not using any gel or water. It took us over 6 months of experimenting and re-implementing different papers, before we came across our current design. Which was the result of a fortuitous accident.
If you look at the Muse S headband reviews on Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/MUSE-Headband-Overnight-Meditation-Re..., you'll see many people having difficulty with electrodes tearing. I tried a Muse S myself, and quickly saw wear on their electrodes.
The design we're currently using, I've had for over 1 month with no degradation in signal quality - I live next to the ocean, so lots of salt in the air, and I try to treat the electrodes badly. The other bands that we have in use are also maintaining good signal over the few weeks of use.
The formula we're working on with industrial design atm is the balance of comfort, signal quality (maintain connection - as I said, electrodes are now good), and robustness.
There are lots of other stims in the pipeline, and lots more research to done! It's a super exciting space.
One anecdote from our early development. When I was using one of our early stims, I woke up when it should have held me in deep sleep. I was a bit disappointed, as I'd had good results for a few days. Then I realized, I wasn't hearing the stim, so I actually wasn't awake. That realization woke me up. :)
Not even for the typical reasons of 'ads and privacy'. What happens if the business fails? Someone pushes bad code? The organization is sold? Something we can't anticipate now? I'd need the certainty that I can take full control over it if needed.
Everyone and their dog gets one of these chips because they're so cheap, easy, and ubiquitous that you can walk right down to your doctor's office and have it installed same day, covered by your insurance!
Then some black-hat hackers come by and pull a Captain Crunch and blast a specific frequency at the highest power possible and it immediately makes everyone with the chip go to sleep.
And also:
> “should anything go wrong” the person wearing the device would “swallow a pill that would kill the cells inside the chip only, leaving the rest of their body unaffected.”
I wouldn't be the first person to sign up for this, but it looks like they at least did do some basic thinking about security.
The VAST majority of users do not care, and many programmers (myself included) do not believe that formal verification is likely for many larger or more complex systems if they have a tech stack element somewhere in mix (probably not on the device itself but perhaps interfacing / programming it).
We will see who wins in the market, the open source player with a public and extensive FORMAL verification (NOT EASY!) or the closed source player, first to market, sales reps going to Drs offices etc
Or do I need to plug myself “in” every few days?
Gotta be honest though, that kind of creeps me out. As much as I do understand that not everything living in my body is me, the idea of implanting other living cells is kind of disgusting on a fundamental level.
And if airplane would be in crash it would be easy to switch OFF all on a board before plane crashed on ground.
But if therapies requiring prolonged clinic / hospital visits like chemotherapies or IV infusions could be given out using this technology that might be life changing.
The pills themselves also tend to be somewhat indiscriminate with where they cause the substance release. When you release a substance that does X into the body via the stomach, or even an injection, you end up with a lot more hitting receptor sites scattered across the body. For example, SSRIs often cause nausea since they affect the serotonin receptors in your GI tract. Just having serotonin released inside the brain would totally side-step this.
That said, my point is more about addiction. A large amount of sleeping pills are also common drugs of abuse, and can be highly addictive. A brain chip would not have nearly the same abuse potential.