LifeQ has announced a ground-breaking new sleep solution for clinicians and patients, helping uncover sleep disorders, achieve greater sleep quality and improve health and wellness.
“LifeQ’s solution harnesses the power of wearables, identifying and classifying all sleep within a 24-hour period, providing insights that go well beyond the average doctor’s office visit,” said Laurence Olivier, CEO, LifeQ. “Providing more resources to sleep clinicians will facilitate greater patient reach and outcomes by addressing some of the challenges posed by the traditionally cumbersome and costly process of diagnosing and treating sleep disorders.”
The first component of LifeQ’s clinical solution is the individual’s longitudinal sleep history. The fact that the solution starts working before the person is in the clinical domain makes a major difference. By also taking into consideration naps and rests outside the patient’s main sleep episode, LifeQ determines the patient’s unique sleep circadian window; this will help to more accurately uncover when the body needs to sleep and when the best time is to get optimal sleep. If there are underlying sleep disorders present, LifeQ’s technology may detect patterns or changes in sleep data and suggests that the user communicate this information to the physician.
During a sleep session, the body repeatedly cycles through light, deep and REM sleep, as well as short periods of wakefulness, which the patient might not be aware of.
Depending on the duration of the sleep session, a person will move through up to five sleep cycles, each lasting about 90 minutes on average. Each cycle usually starts with light sleep, followed by deep sleep, REM sleep and ends with a brief period awake. However, sleep cycles are not necessarily all the same; the early part of the night consists of more deep sleep and the later part contains more REM sleep.
“These sleep stages are important because the duration and distribution of each sleep stage may reveal important information about a person’s mental and physical well-being,” said Dr. Irshaad Ebrahim, Chief Sleep Officer at LifeQ and Founder of the London Sleep Centre. “For example, individuals with depression characteristically demonstrate fragmented deep sleep and increased REM sleep. Deep and REM sleep are particularly important in consolidating memories and play a role in cognitive performance. Research suggests that deep sleep is also involved in repairing damaged tissues and restoring energy sources.”
LifeQ-connected wearable devices continuously and accurately track various measurements such as heart rate, activity and sleep. These biometrics are processed using proprietary LifeQ algorithms based on computational systems biology. Sleep metrics are visualised in LifeQ Health, the company’s comprehensive end-user health app, along with biometrics and insights covering other physiological systems.