Thread: Has anyone tried Zeo?

I got a Zeo yesterday! Here are my impressions:

A lot of effort went into the design of this product. The headband is made of a soft elastic fabric and is adjustable. The sensors and wireless transmitter contact your forehead. Unless you sleep on your stomach, it should be quite comfortable. More comfortable, I would think, than a LD sleep mask, although I have never used a sleep mask.

The display is about 7 1/2" x 4 1/2" x 4", not much bigger than a standard digital alarm clock. There is a cradle on the back of the display for recharging the headband. A nice feature is a magnet that holds the headband in place while it is being charged.

Like most electronic devices these days, the Zeo uses a menu system to set preferences and to retrieve various types of information. There are dedicated buttons along the top which pull up menus for things like alarm, time setting, sleep data, etc. In the top center there is a cluster of four directional buttons for traversing menus.

The packaging, although not really important, is extremely slick and reflects the care and talent that went into the design of this product. (see Nunosi's unboxing above). All in all, I would have to give the Zeo an A+ on product design.

I've only used the Zeo one night, so my take on performance is superficial and subject to revision. The graph of sleep phases seemed to be mostly accurate. As expected, deep sleep occurred in the first few hours, and REM occurred mostly in the last part of the sleep cycle. Unfortunately it is impossible to verify the time and duration of REM unless you wake up and record the time, but subjectively the graph of REM seemed about right.

There did seem to be some confusion between wake and REM. I was awake for about an hour after an initial period of deep sleep (too much caffeine). During this one hour period the graph showed several brief, 5 minute periods of REM interspersed. This was probably wrong. My guess is that during the wake period there was some eye movement that confused the algorithm. Still I judge the sleep phase graph to be quite usable and mostly accurate. I give the Zeo a B on performance.

I'm a hacker, and I contacted BrianS on Friday about getting access to the library that he is developing. Brian was very helpful, and I would encourage any other programmers, if you have the time and inclination, to get in touch with him. The Zeo has great potential as LD tool and developing a really excellent LD application will be an interesting and useful project.

In summary, I like the Zeo and would recommend it.