Photo: Courtesy Of Intelclinic.
As far as vital bodily functions go, sleep is probably the biggest stumper. No matter how hard we try to get our eight hours (yeah, right), the fact that we often wake up groggy and grumpy makes us, well, groggy and grumpy.
Leave it to technology to unlock the secrets to better sleep. A new Kickstarter project from Polish tech startup Intelclinic promises to help you sleep better in shorter periods of time.
The company is currently in production on the NeuroOn, a smart eye mask that monitors basically everything about the way you sleep, from when you doze off to your brain waves and eye movements. Like seemingly everything else these days, the mask automatically syncs this data to your iPhone or Android. Since it tracks your sleep cycles, the mask can wake you up gently at an optimal point to minimize grogginess.
But the real point of the mask is to help users adopt a polyphasic sleep pattern. By minimizing your sleep at night and scheduling in periodic naps during the day, researchers say a polyphasic schedule maximizes productivity, giving practitioners up to 20 years of time they would have otherwise spent in bed.
While and extra two decades of sentient life does sound pretty great, we'll keep our eight (10?) hours, thank you very much. Our favorite part of this whole thing? The engineers are developing programs for the mask to help users bounce back from jet lag more quickly. Now, here's hoping they come in design options other than the one above.
(FastCo. Labs)