Tag : Asleep

Washington: Bioengineers have developed a unique mattress and pillow system that uses heating and cooling to tell the body it is time to go to sleep. Sleep is possible when the body temperature declines at night as part of the 24-hour rhythm. This new mattress stimulates the body to trigger the sleepy feeling, helping people fall asleep faster and improving the quality of sleep. "We facilitate the readiness to fall asleep by manipulating internal body temperature-sensitive sensors to briefly adjust the thermostat of the body so it thinks the temperature is higher than it actually is," said Shahab Haghayegh, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School's Division of Sleep Medicine and Brigham and Women's Hospital, who helped lead the development of the mattress at UT Austin while earning a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. Haghayegh graduated in 2020. The skin of the neck is an important bodily thermostat for humans, and it is the primary sensor the mattress targets, with a warming pillow. The mattress is designed to simultaneously cool the central areas of the body while heating up the neck, hands and feet, thereby increasing blood flow to dissipate body heat. The researchers published a proof-of-concept study about the unique combination warming pillow plus cooling-warming, dual-zone mattress system in the Journal of Sleep Research, looking at two versions of the mattress: one that uses water and another that uses air to manipulate the core body temperature. They tested the mattresses with 11 subjects, asking them to go to bed two hours earlier than usual, some nights using the cooling-warming functions of the mattresses and other nights not. The study found that the warming and the cooling-warming mattress helped them fall asleep ...