[娛樂時尚] 您的私人睡眠教練

Your own sleep coach

(Fortune Small Business) -- Few of us make money by losing sleep. But three grad students at Brown University in Providence built a company around sleep deprivation.

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Jason Donahue, Ben Rubin and Eric Shashoua were working late nights in Brown's business and engineering schools -- and began thinking about ways to sleep better. They discovered they weren't alone in burning the midnight oil. Around 20% of Americans get less than six hours of rest a night. (See our cover story, "Make Sleep Work for You," September 2008.)

The friends imagined a smart alarm clock that could track how much time we spend in the most restorative stages of the sleep cycle: REM and deep sleep. What would it cost to design such a thing?

Answer: five years of research, 20 hires, $14 million in funding and a whole lot of doubting from investors and scientists.

The trio's company, Zeo, based in Newton, Mass., launched its product in June. The Zeo device uses a patent-pending headband with tiny sensors that scan your brain for signs of four sleep states: REM, light, deep and waking sleep (which saps your energy). The smart alarm clock displays a graph of your sleep pattern and wakes you as you're transitioning out of REM sleep (which is when you're least groggy). In the morning you can upload the data to the company's Web site, and so track your sleep over time. The cost, $399, includes six months' access to one of Zeo's online sleep coaches.

Most of the feedback comes in the form of Zeo's ZQ score -- an index of how well the device thinks you've slept.

"Zeo allows people to unlock this mysterious black box of sleep," says Dave Dickinson, a veteran health-care CEO whom the founders brought onboard in 2007 to run the business side.

Whether any of this actually improves sleep is up to the consumer, who will also need to make lifestyle changes like cutting out alcohol before bedtime or caffeine after 3 p.m.

"No one should mistake it for a diagnostic tool," says Darrel Drobnich, chief program officer at the National Sleep Foundation (though he does say Zeo is "a neat product that can educate people").

That Zeo exists at all is remarkable. When the trio first started shopping their idea around, scientists told them no consumer product could match the costly monitoring equipment of professional sleep labs. Their first prototype was made from a headband and an Altoids mints tin, which Shashoua admits turned off investors.

"When we had a better-looking prototype, that changed," he says.

Eventually the startup scored $14 million, mainly from venture capital firms Trident Capital and iD Ventures America. It also won over renowned sleep scientists, such as Harvard Medical School's Charles Czeisler, who now sits on Zeo's advisory board.

For now the company is selling Zeo online only. Dickinson is looking at distribution deals with stores that carry consumer health-care gadgets. He also plans to expand to countries such as Australia, where sleep deprivation approaches U.S. levels.

(Fortune Small Business)——我們很少有人能從失眠中賺錢。但是在普羅維登斯市的布朗大學（Brown University），三名研究生卻創立了一個有關睡眠不足的公司。

傑森•唐納休（Jason Donahue）、本•羅賓（Ben Rubin）和埃瑞克•沙舒瓦（Eric Shashoua）就讀於布朗大學商學院和工程學院，他們經常熬夜學習，於是開始尋找改善睡眠的方法。他們發現，開夜車的並不只有他們三個，20%的美國人每晚休息時間還不足六小時。

於是，他們設想發明一種智能鬧鐘，跟蹤人們睡眠週期中睡眠質量最高階段的時間長度：快速眼動睡眠（REM）和深度睡眠階段。那麼，設計這樣一個產品的成本有多大呢？

答案是：五年的研究，20個僱員，1400萬資金，以及投資者和科學家們的質疑。

三人成立的公司名爲Zeo，總部位於馬薩諸塞州牛頓市，六月開始正式投入生產。Zeo設備使用了一種擁有專利權的頭帶，上面有許多微小的感應器，能掃描大腦，從而反映大腦的四個睡眠狀態：快速眼動睡眠、淺度睡眠、深度睡眠和醒覺(這種狀態會消耗人的精力）。這種智能鬧鐘能顯示人的睡眠模式，並在快速眼動睡眠快結束時發聲使人醒來（這也是人最軟弱無力的時候）。每天早晨，你可以把數據上傳到公司網站上，一段時間後，就可以追蹤自己的睡眠狀況。Zeo的價格是399美元，購買者還可以得到一名Zeo網上睡眠教練六個月的指導。

大多數的反饋都是以Zeo“睡商”（ZQ）分數的形式反映回來——即設備對睡眠質量的判斷指數。

戴夫•狄更生（Dave Dickinson）是一名從事醫療保健行業的資深首席執行官。他說，“Zeo使人們打開睡眠這個神祕的黑匣子。”Zeo的創立者在2007年邀請他加入負責公司的業務。

這項發明能否真的改善睡眠質量得由消費者來判斷，消費者還必須改變生活方式，比如睡前不能喝酒、下午三點後不喝咖啡。

全國睡眠基金會（National Sleep Foundation）的首席程序官戴若•卓布尼奇（Darrel Drobnich）說：“不能把Zeo誤當成診斷工具。”（儘管他也說，這是一種“能教育大衆的好產品”）。

Zeo的存在本身就是件不平凡的事。當三個創始人開始到處推廣他們的產品時，科學家告訴他們，沒有任何消費產品能比得上專業睡眠實驗室裏昂貴的監測設備。Zeo產品最初的原型由一個頭帶和一個Altoids薄荷口香糖錫罐製成。沙舒瓦承認，這個設計確實嚇退了一些投資者。

他說：“我們後來設計了更美觀的造型，改變了這個局面。”

最終，這個開發過程花了1400萬美元，資金主要來自風險投資公司Trident Capital和iD Ventures America。它還獲得了著名睡眠科學家的支持，比如來自哈佛醫學院的查爾斯•切斯勒（Charles Czeisler），他現在是Zeo諮詢委員會的成員。

目前，Zeo產品只能通過網絡出售。狄更生正在尋找可以合作的醫療保健器材經銷商。他還計劃進軍睡眠不足狀況類似於美國的國外市場，如澳大利亞。