People that suffers from sleep disorders, have to suffer in labs in order to reach the reasons behind their problem, they have to sleep all night attached to several complicated sensors that monitors the brain, heart, eye and respiratory activity all night to check the brain while the three stages of sleep – the dream sleep, the light sleep and the deep sleep.
I guess that would make sleep disorder to the people who don’t suffer one, but if you can measure those things in your bed wearing a T-shirt, I think those measurements are going to be more accurate and more close to the real measurements.
Matt Bianchi, a sleep neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital with Carson Darling, Pablo Bello, and Thomas Lipoma invented a Nightshirt embedded with fabric electronics to monitor the wearer’s breathing patterns. A small chip worn in a pocket of the shirt processes that data to determine the phase of sleep, such as REM sleep (when we dream), light sleep, or deep sleep.
Nyx’s Somnus shirt dramatically simplifies this by focusing only on respiration. During REM sleep, the respiratory pattern is irregular, with differences in the size of breaths and the spacing between them. Breathing during deep sleep follows an ordered pattern, The lighter stages of non-REM sleep fall somewhere in between. Analyzing sleep stages based on respiration is still considered experimental. But Bianchi is now testing the device on patients who come to his sleep clinic who are also assessed using standard technology, known as polysomnography. The team will soon begin home tests of the shirts to further validate its use outside of the lab. The company hopes to have a commercial product available by summer of 2012 for less than $100.