Sleep trackers like Oura, Whoop, & Eight Sleep have opened the door to accessible health data for the everyday person. Globally and in America, we are realizing the opportunity these devices are unlocking – nearly 20% of Americans are using fitness tracking devices or smart watches, and in 2019 globally, end users spent nearly $41 billion on wearable devices.
Despite being more well equipped to quantify and track our sleep, we’re still facing a crisis with the state of our collective sleep health.
More than one-third of Americans are not getting enough sleep, (some reports say upwards of 56% of Americans suffer from poor sleep symptoms) and furthermore, 68% of Americans have developed worse sleep during the pandemic. Not only has the quality of our sleep suffered but the quantity has also decreased dramatically. The average American is now only sleeping 6.8 hours per night, compared to just a few decades ago when the average sleep time was 8 hours.
To put this into perspective, the CDC notes that sleeping less than 7 hours per night is linked to increased severe health risks including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, strokes, & chronic smoking.
So what do we do?
Along with my co-founder Jason, we’ve dealt with many challenges to our health and sleep which inspired us to start building a company focused on sleep health. We’ve worked with experts from institutions like Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, talked to countless users and customers who want to improve their sleep, and we’ve led a research study on wearables and sleep – featured by Oura.
From these experiences, I noticed two areas in particular that were key to delivering real change & a positive impact on our sleep health. The first area was realizing that a myriad of individuals were eager to turn their wearable data into actionable insights and recommendations.
Many of these people, including myself, have exhausted all the common, generic advice out there – from trying countless supplements to meditation to getting morning sunlight. But they had no idea whether these actions were making a real difference on their sleep quality. We sought to change this, by analyzing wearables data in order to provide more personalized and actionable insights.
We also realized that sometimes, many of us are simply too busy to enact the behaviors we need to improve our sleep health. Every week, when work piles up, we forget to block some time for ourselves to unwind, & we simply don’t have the energy to follow through on the small habits that will help us sleep at our best. This is where we discovered the need for continuous human guidance and accountability.
We have personal trainers who hold us accountable to our fitness, nutritionists who guide us in finding the right meals, and even friends who help us stay on track for our short term and long term goals. Unfortunately, this same access to experts to help us with our sleep is missing.
As written by PubMed, there are approximately 659 Behavioral sleep medicine specialists in the US and in terms of sleep specialists, there are roughly 1 for every 44,000 Americans. With this information top of mind, our second area of focus became clear – expanding access to experts and coaches who can keep us stay on track & hold us accountable to improving our sleep health.
My company, Bioloop Sleep, believes that by combining a human expert coach, with the power of promising new wearable technology, we can empower you to sleep better, with real-time accountability, feedback, and guidance.
Join the movement of people taking control of their sleep and making their sleep health a priority with Bioloop Sleep.