Friday, April 27, 2012

Progress

Time for a progress update on my personal performance.  Below you will see 3 trends, my Zeo sleep score, my "Whack a Mole" and my "Goodness", each smoothed with a moving average, since February 20th, 2012.  So, I've been collecting this data for about 67 days.


The Zeo Sleep Score above comes from the Zeo Bedside unit where it scores my sleep by length, quantities of REM and Deep and deducts points for number of times I wake and duration awake.  My Zeo Sleep Score has been trending upward.  Good.

The "Whack-a-Mole" is a measure of my response time by measuring the average time it takes for me to click on a little picture that jumps around a window.  I take this "test" most every morning and sometimes during the day as well.  Lower is better.  My response time is becoming faster, but I sense it is leveling off.

Above is my personal subjective feeling of "Goodness".  How good I feel which I record using a slider, higher is better.  It has also been rising but I see it leveling off.  That may be because I am in fact reaching a plateau or there's a psychological aspect to adapting to "better" and not wanting to slide the bar higher.  These kinds of things is why I collect a variety of performance metrics, and these 3 are not the only ones, there are 8 of them I collect (?!).

OK, so, I've been getting better and that is good news.  I might be reaching a plateau and that is something to ponder ... how to take the next step up.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Comparison: "Sleep like Android" vs. Zeo

Someone mentioned accelerometer based sleep monitors and there so happens to be a popular one for my Android (Motorola Android Razr Maxx) called "Sleep like Android" so I downloaded, installed, read through the instructions.  You plug your phone into the power (so it does not fully discharge) and put your phone on the mattress and "Sleep like Android" uses the phone's accelerometer to detect movement to try to classify your sleep in simplistic terms, on a continuum from Deep to Light.  The idea is if you are moving, you are awake or in light sleep, or maybe REM, or something.  Below is an image that compares my ResMed S9 AutoSet respiration (low and stead during Deep, volatile during REM) and my Zeo (big 'eyes' during Deep, volatile during REM) with the Zeo classifications from their website at the bottom.  The black chart is the "Sleep like Android" output.

You can see the "Sleep like Android" output does NOT match with anything from the medical device (ResMed) nor the Zeo brain wave monitor.  It shows "light" during Deep, shows "deep" during REM, the Zeo shows some "Wakes" but nary a blip on the "Sleep like Android"

I may try some additional nights to double check, but in my initial view... "Sleep like Android" does not work and is not useful, at least for me.  This does not suggest other accelerometer based sleep monitors do not work, just that the "phone on a mattress" look to be a weak solution.

Major advantage: My phone was fully charged in the morning, ready for a busy day. :)