Better Sleep: Engineered Mattress Tricks Your Body to Fall Asleep Faster



People experience alertness and sleepiness in waves during the course of a day. In reality, a 24-hour regularity of their body temperature governs this experience to some extent. Bioengineers from The University of Texas at Austin have now created a novel mattress and pillow system that employs warmth and cooling to signal the body when it is time to sleep.
Sleep is induced when the body temperature dips at night as part of the 24-hour cycle. Due to the stimulation of the new mattress, people may be able to fall asleep more easily and have higher-quality sleep.

Shahab Haghayegh, a research fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, who oversaw the creation of the mattress at UT Austin while pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, explained that they "facilitate the readiness to fall asleep by manipulating internal body temperature-sensitive sensors to briefly adjust the thermostat of the body so it thinks the temperature is higher than it actually is." 2020 saw Haghayegh's graduation.

Humans' neck skin serves as a crucial internal thermostat. The mattress therefore uses a heated pillow to target it as the main sensor. The tailored mattress is created to simultaneously chill the major portions of the body while heating the neck, hands, and feet in order to stimulate blood flow and remove body heat.

The ebb and flow of a 24-hour rhythm of a person's body temperature affects how awake or drowsy they feel in part. Bioengineers at The University of Texas in Austin have created a special mattress and pillow system that employs cooling and heating to signal the body when it is time to sleep.

The researchers presented a proof-of-concept study regarding the novel cooling-warming, dual-zone mattress system and warming pillow combo in the Journal of Sleep Research. It examined two different mattress designs, one that controls the body's core temperature using water and the other with air. Eleven people participated in the mattress testing. They were instructed to go to bed two hours earlier than usual, sometimes utilizing the beds' heating-cooling features and sometimes not.

Even in the tough environment of an earlier bedtime, the results show that the warming and cooling-warming mattress helped them fall asleep more quickly – almost 58 percent more quickly compared to nights when they did not employ the cooling-warming feature. Decreased internal body temperature resulted in considerably better sleep quality together with a sharp reduction in the time required to fall asleep.

The study grew out of a bigger objective at Kenneth Diller's group at the Cockrell School of Engineering to discover novel applications for thermal stimulation as a sleep aid. Diller is a specialist in heat and temperature management for therapeutic devices. In a study that was published in 2019, the researchers discovered that having a warm bath an hour or so before bedtime helped participants fall asleep more easily and sleep better.

While comparable, this endeavor is more focused. The signal that it is time to sleep is sent when the body's internal temperature drops at the appropriate circadian hour. It made more sense to target a small number of key body regions that regulate heat dissipation and subsequently body temperature level rather than the entire body.

It is amazing how well moderate warmth along the cervical spine works to tell the body to increase blood flow to the hands and feet, which lowers core temperature and speeds up the start of sleep, according to Diller. The cardiovascular system can benefit from a rest from the strain of sustaining blood flow throughout everyday activities, which is crucial for long-term health. The same mechanism also allows blood pressure to decline somewhat overnight.

By UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN 

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