What’s the News: Smart clothes might soon be coming into bed with you. A company is developing shirts endowed with a chip that senses the changes in breathing that accompany shifts in sleep phase, to help people track how variables like exercise, coffee intake, and stress affect their sleep.
How the Heck:
Subjects in a sleep lab are usually hooked up to an array of instruments to track brain activity, muscle activity, breathing, and other measures. But a scientist involved in the shirt’s development says that for determining sleep phases, simple breathing patterns alone can suffice (via Technology Review):
During REM sleep [when we dream], 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, “like a sine wave,” says Bianchi. The lighter stages of non-REM sleep fall somewhere in between.
People could use the ...
