Various intervention therapies ranging from pharmaceutical to hi-tech
tailored solutions have been available to treat difficulty in falling asleep
commonly caused by insomnia in modern life. However, current techniques largely
remain ill-suited, ineffective, and unreliable due to their lack of precise
real-time sleep tracking, in-time feedback on the therapies, an ability to keep
people asleep during the night, and a large-scale effectiveness evaluation.
Here, we introduce a novel sleep aid system, called Earable, that can
continuously sense multiple head-based physiological signals and simultaneously
enable closed-loop auditory stimulation to entrain brain activities in time for
effective sleep promotion. We develop the system in a lightweight, comfortable,
and user-friendly headband with a comprehensive set of algorithms and dedicated
own-designed audio stimuli. We conducted multiple protocols from 883 sleep
studies on 377 subjects (241 women, 119 men) wearing either a gold-standard
device (PSG), Earable, or both concurrently. We demonstrate that our system
achieves (1) a strong correlation (0.89 +/- 0.03) between the physiological
signals acquired by Earable and those from the gold-standard PSG, (2) an 87.8
+/- 5.3% agreement on sleep scoring using our automatic real-time sleep staging
algorithm with the consensus scored by three sleep technicians, and (3) a
successful non-pharmacological stimulation alternative to effectively shorten
the duration of sleep falling by 24.1 +/- 0.1 minutes. These results show that
the efficacy of Earable exceeds existing techniques in intentions to promote
fast falling asleep, track sleep state accurately, and achieve high social
acceptance for real-time closed-loop personalized neuromodulation-based home
sleep care.Comment: 33 pages, 8 figure