Almost 31 million people, or 10% of the total population of the United States, suffer from insomnia. Characterized by an inability to fall asleep and difficulty in remaining asleep, sufferers of insomnia typically find it hard to gain a full, restful sleep. Although a daily part of the human life, the process of sleeping is poorly understood and subject to ongoing and continuous research on its diverse properties and mechanisms of action. While modern science struggles to delineate the exact functions of sleep, hundreds of years of medical research have given us an insight into the potential causes and effects of a lack of regular, restful sleep.
Sleep can be broken down into four different stages. The first three stages of sleep, classified as NREM 1, 2 and 3, are associated with the gradual descent into the fourth and most important stage of sleep, REM sleep. REM, or Rapid Eye Movement sleep, is the unconscious state the body enters while the body repairs damage, flushes toxins built up over the wakeful day from the brain, and dreams. REM sleep and dreaming are the subject of much debate in the medical, neurological and psychological community, subject to a huge amount of discourse that eventually wanders into nebulous philosophical propositions on the nature of consciousness.
Concrete scientific evidence, however, demonstrates that a long term lack of REM sleep has negative effects on the health of the body. Poor sleep health and a lack of REM sleep is caused by significant life stresses, physical discomfort and illnesses, emotional issues, poor sleeping environments, medications and pharmaceuticals, or interferences in normal sleep schedules such as jet lag or working late night shifts. A lack of proper restful sleep leads to tiredness throughout the wakeful day, poor cognitive function, concentration and memory recall, irritability, and will eventually contribute to severe health disorders such as diabetes or high blood pressure. Extreme, extended sleep deprivation causes systemic organ failure, hallucinations, and even death.
About iBand +
There are many solutions available to assist individuals suffering from insomnia, designed to help users regain control over their sleep schedule and enhance their overall health through better rest. Many solutions, however, either rely on herbal extracts that are not grounded in clinical science, or powerful pharmaceutical sleep inducing chemicals that have a long term and potentially negative effect on the psyche of the user.
Until recently the only solution to the problem of insomnia and sleep schedule issues were pharmaceutical, but recent developments in the miniaturization and commercialization of EEG, or electroencephalogram technology, have allowed the consumer to access medical grade, noninvasive brain stimulation devices that provide restful and restorative sleep without the need for dangerous neurochemical stimulants or ineffective herbal extracts.
The iBand+ is a new development in the application of technology that interacts with the electromagnetic waves produced by the human brain. Consisting of a miniaturized EEG headband and paired with a smartphone app, the iBand+ is able to monitor the waveforms produced by your brain during sleep with laboratory-level accuracy, and then interact with your unconscious mind through audio-visual wavelengths to induce both restful REM sleep, or interestingly, lucid dreams. Backed by a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign that has raised over €424,200 in just one month, the iBand+ project has completely surpassed its original €50k goal in a matter of days.
How Does the iBand+ Work?
The iBand+ consists of RGB LED’s on a comfortable, ergonomic headband and a pair of iBand+ pillow speakers that are inserted into the pillow before sleep. Contained within the iBand+ Headband are brainwave sensing EEG monitors and health tracking sensors that observe your body movement, heart rate and body temperature. The information collected by this high accuracy suite of sensors is processed through an advanced auto-learning software algorithm that then uses the pillow speakers and RGB lights to deliver audio-visual stimuli that interacts with the subconscious brain of the sleeper, promoting either more restful sleep, or lucid dreaming.
The iBand+ delivers five key functions through its advanced, science-based sleep enhancing algorithm. Sleep improvement is achieved through music that intelligently adjusts to the polyphasic patterns of your sleep, while sleep tracking monitors your sleep to help you keep track of your sleeping patterns and give feedback on improvement. A Smart Alarm function wakes the user up with simulated natural sunlight at the optimum phase of the sleep cycle, ensuring users are woken up outside of deep-sleep REM cycles for maximum restoration and regeneration. Health tracking functions help users monitor their long term health through an attached smartphone app, while a lucid dreaming inducing function helps users achieve lucid states during their dream cycles.
What is Lucid Dreaming and How Does the iBand+ Help Achieve it?
Lucid dreaming is a mysterious and complicated mental state that occurs during deep sleep cycles. Although dreams are inherently subjective and are difficult to approach from any other philosophical perspective other than the solipsistic, lucid dreams are defined by general consensus to be a dream in which the dreamer is aware of the fact that they are inside a dream state.
Dreamers experiencing lucid dreams report the ability to control the narrative, characters, environment and worldspace of their dreams, likening the experience to the ultimate “virtual reality” simulation. Many thousands of different techniques for achieving lucid dreaming states are available online, but before the iBand+, there has not been a reliable, mechanical technological method for inducing lucid dreams.
iBand+ causes a dreamer to enter a lucid dreaming state by sensing when the sleeper enters the deepest phase of sleep, REM sleep. By interacting with the sleeper using subtle external stimuli, the headset is able to cause the dreamer to experience anomalies within their dreams, causing the realisation that the current experienced is in fact a dream, and beginning the lucid dreaming process.
iBand+ Pricing and Availability
The iBand+ is available to preorder from Kickstarter, and with the first two pledge levels unavailable, the lowest price for a preorder is currently €149, or roughly $165 USD. If you’re looking for a solution that allows you the unlimited freedom of lucid dreaming without complicated mental patterning regimes, or simply want to experienced better and more restful sleep, the iBand+ is the perfect sleep and dream enhancing companion.
