This post assumes that you’ve already read Project outline – using Zeo to attain lucidity. If you haven’t, it will probably not make much sense.
The last post described the general idea of the project, this time we’ll go into specifics.
The centerpiece of the whole setup is the Zeo personal sleep analysis device. The Zeo comes with the ability to upload your sleep data to the Zeo web site out-of-the-box, with options to export the data for use in Excel or other applications. This is nice enough for consumers and most enthusiasts, but as a developer you crave a more direct access.
Luckily, the makers of Zeo realize and encourage this, and offer extensions/upgrades such as the Zeo Data Decoder Library that gives access to the data stored on the memory card used by the Zeo without having to upload it to their web site first, and the Zeo Raw Data Library that takes things one step further and allows for data to be extracted from the device in real time, something that is crucial to this project.
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Even though I hope that my electronical devices will help me with lucid dreaming, the power to attain it obviously comes from the mind itself. This has been apparent the last week – just thinking about sleep and dreaming has made this the most dream intense period in many years. Having been remembering one dream every other week or so, I now have one from every other night. I’ve been dating the crown princess of Sweden, I’ve been flying and I’ve been interrogated on how I was able to fly!
Having the Zeo also makes it possible to compare the amount of REM sleep on a night I remember dreams vividly from, to one where I remember them just vaguely or not at all. Last night for example, dreaming about flying, I logged an impressive 170 minutes of REM sleep! I still haven’t had any real lucid dreams however, but I am getting closer. Once after a nightmare, one of those where everything just goes terribly wrong, I woke up feeling all relieved it was all just a dream. Then woke up for real…
I’ve been hinting at a Project for some time now, on the blog as well as various lucid dreaming and sleep related forums. Now it’s finally time to give some more details on what I have in mind.
First of all, if you haven’t heard of lucid dreaming before, it’s basically dreaming – but being aware that you are dreaming with more or less ability to control your actions and your environment. Most people have had it at some point, usually waking up by the chock of realizing that they’re dreaming but still conscious. A few people practice for years to learn how to master lucid dreaming and make it into an art form. Me myself is somewhere in between the two extremes, having had a few short lucid dreams and seen enough to want more.
The big challenge when it comes to lucid dreaming is to go from a passive observer to an active and conscious participant in the dream. People have been trying out various techniques such as drinking a lot before going to be, telling themselves to check if they’re dreaming when they go for a glass of water, which they very well could be doing in their dreams as the mind interprets the body even when sleeping. The hardcore practitioners go directly from being awake to the dream state without losing consciousness.
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I never finished my “intelligent alarm clock”, but luckily, someone else did it for me. Modern smartphones such as the iPhone and the various Android phones available includes a whole range of sensors and one of them, the accelerometer measuring tilt and movement of the phone, can be used for analyzing sleep patterns! This approach is along the same lines as my first attempt at creating an intelligent alarm clock using a webcamera to detect movements. Deeper sleep means less movement and REM sleep means more. More movement could however just as well be you tossing and turning in bed trying to go back to sleep and getting a proper analysis of a nights sleep for $1 or less just seems to good to be true. If you want to have a go at a cheap solution that may or may not be of use to you and happen to have an iPhone or Android phone however, you may want to try Sleep Cycle alarm clock for iPhone or Smart Alarm Clock for Android.
A more impressive device, both in terms of price and functionality, is the Zeo. This device uses EEG, the crème de la crème of sleep sensors, to read the electrical activity of the brain during the night. Measuring the activity of the brain directly opens up a whole range of new applications, many of which the Zeo delivers out of the box, such as measuring how long it takes to fall asleep, how many times you woke up during the night (even if you don’t remember doing it) and most importantly of all for my project – it gives you an indication of whether or not you may be dreaming at any specific point in time during the night.
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To fulfill my goal of building an intelligent alarm clock, I needed a way of objectivetly measure and analyze parameters of the body in close to real time. My first attempt was to use a cheap web camera pointed to my bed and an existing application for detecting movements to check how much and when I moved around during sleep. Unfortunately, my 2002 consumer grade web camera required quite a lot of light to get any sort of picture at all, so all I got was a large number of short videos of me turning away from the bright annoying light to one side of me. This was obviously not going to help me wake up rested. A briefly considered getting a night vision camera, but doing so was way out of my budget at the time.
Other measurable quantities included skin temperature, breathing frequency, heart rate and brainwave changes. I was unable to find any accurate enough temperature sensor that could be worn during sleep, breathing frequencies just seemed too unreliable and EEG scans was again way out of my budget. This left me with the ECG/heart rate option. Heart rate monitors of various kinds have been around for quite some time to help people get the intended effect out of physical exercice, so there were a lot of consumer hardware out there already that I might be able to use – the problem was how to get it to interact with my application.
The fully integrated pulse watches would be no good to me unless I could somehow extract the heart rate from them, and the watches I found sold with a wireless chest band unit all seemed to use proprietary wireless technology which would be hard to reverse engineer. If only I’ve had the bluetooth heart rate monitor I do in fact have today back then! Finally I found an online store that sold a wireless heart rate monitor chest band with a receiver unit, still only for their proprietary system, but getting some sort of signal on a simple wire looked like a reasonable starting point.
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to figure out how things around me worked. I don’t know how many old cassette players, record players and other abandoned technology I dissected, later on using the parts to build fun but utterly useless combinations of motors, lights and simple sensors. The height of my career as a youngster may have been when I managed to program a radio-controlled car by recording the modulated signal as audio using a walkie-talkie receiver, then playing it back again as audio, sending it through the walkie-talkie and managing to have the car roughly repeat the same path.
The same drive grew into a passion for two fields many see as opposites, computer programming and psychology. I’m currently employed in the first capacity, but love extending my knowledge of how people, myself especially, actually function. The ultimate result would be combing my two areas of interest into one by having electronics interact with humans, enhancing their capacity and maybe even understanding of themselves.
In 2002 I was enrolled at Chalmers University of Technology and during some periods, I had a lot of time to spend on my own projects. I happened to be reading about sleep, and realized how much your morning feel from using a regular alarm clock to wake up at a fixed time depended on pure luck. If you were in deep sleep when the alarm clock went off, waking up would be a chock to your body and you’d feel disoriented and groggy. On the other hand, if the alarm went off when you were close to waking up naturally already, it would be much easier to get up at once. What if I could build a device that analyzed my sleep and woke me up at just the right time?
Next time – building an intelligent alarm clock.
