Temperature Hacking for Better Deep and REM Sleep with Matteo Franceschetti

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Explain how you are getting data from people when they're sleeping with the pad that goes on their mattress and then what you're doing to change it. So kind of walk me through data gathering what you can see, and then walk me through what you do after you see it.

Yeah, absolutely. So as you were saying, our product is a cover that you can install onto any mattress and you can retrofit it. The COVID has multiple sensors embedded in it. We use a technology called ballistocardiography. It's like sleeping on a stethoscope. Oversimplified. We can pick almost anything about your heart rate, your respiration and your movement. Through these three factors, we can infer sleep. We are within one heartbeat per minute compared to a medical grade ekg. So we are extremely accurate at tracking your heart rate. And again, you don't have to wear anything, you don't have to charge anything. Just go to bed as you did last night. In the future, we will be able to see cardiovascular diseases, we will be able to see sleep apnea, snoring. But by combining all these factors together with movement, we can provide you with all the information about your sleep. So, what time you felt asleep, all the sleep stages, percentage for each of these sleep stages, number of hours slept, then what do we do? So for us, data is just the starting point, it's not the ending point. Because historically, customer always say, oh, all this data is really cool, but so what the. So what is the intervention that is you were mentioning at the beginning of the episode? And so, based on your sleep stages and based on your biometrics, we adjust your body temperature during the night. And it's not that we are reinventing the wheel. Your body is already changing temperature during the night. It's part of your physiological process. So we just enhance that process during the night to maximize your sleep performance. And so in the first part of the night, when you tend to have more deep sleep, we cool you more because it's proven that a colder temperature has a bigger benefit or a bigger impact, positive impact on your deep sleep. In the second part of the night, particularly while you are in rem, we try to provide you what is called thermal neutrality. So when you are in rem, you want to be in an environment that is neutral from a temperature standpoint. It's not cold and it's not hot. And the reason is while you are in rem, your brain deactivates all the temperature controls in the body. And so it doesn't let you fall into REM if it's too hot or too cold, because you could potentially die. And so changing the temperature based on your sleep stages and the different stages of the night is fundamental to maximize your deep and ramp stages.

How many hours of sleep per night do you think you can save people by just changing temperature? So without temperature control, I set my thermostat to whatever the middle of the road is. In the US it would be 72 Fahrenheit. In Europe, it's whatever, 20, 21 centigrade, I think.

So.

Let'S say that I just have that pegged. I'm going to get some quality of sleep in eight hours. If I'm using the eight sleep algorithms that change my temperature to lower it in that first half of the night, how much less sleep is the average person going to need to still get a good night's sleep?

Yeah, Let me start with some stats proven by our numbers. So our customers, they can fall asleep up to 20% faster, they can get up to 40% deep sleep, they get up to 40% less toss and turns and up to 30% less wake ups. We don't have a hard number yet of how much we are compressing your sleep in terms of minutes or percentage. But if you start putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, you understand that there is a substantial improvement in your efficiency. The end goal, what I always say in interview is, can we compress it down to six hours and get in six hours the same amount of rest and recovery I used to get in eight hours?