Show HN: Increasing restorative brain activity during sleep (with real EEG data)
by pedalpete | 2025-11-10 18:14:52+00:00
I’m Pete, co-founder and CEO of Affectable Sleep.

I’m a life-long chronic insomniac. My mum says that even when I was a baby, I’d never sleep. One night at 3 a.m. I thought, “I don’t care if I sleep, I just don’t want to be tired anymore.”

That thought led me to dive deep into sleep medicine. At first, everything I found was the same sleep hygiene advice I’d been told since I was a kid. Then I came across phase-targeted auditory stimulation (PTAS), also known as CLAS or SWE, a form of neurostimulation that increases slow-wave activity during sleep without changing total sleep time.

When I’ve mentioned this in earlier HN comments, it’s often met with scepticism, which I completely understand.

So I made a short video showing real EEG data from one of my own sleep nights using our technology. We run stimulation in a within-night stim/sham protocol, and what we see matches (or exceeds) the effects reported in more than fifty published, peer-reviewed studies. https://youtu.be/HoZvpaOpPu8

Building a consumer-grade wearable EEG that works through the night has been far harder than we expected. We had high standards for comfort, signal quality, and manufacturability, and wanted to do better than previous attempts such as Dreem and Philips or the “fall asleep faster” EEG headbands currently on the market. I made a second video showing the headband itself and some of the design choices we made. https://youtu.be/4exQXRA0bq0

Though we can measure day to day improvements in biomarkers, and cognitive function, one thing I'm interested in seeing is if we can have a significant impact on longevity. Sleep naturally declines as we age, and it isn't just sleep time, but the slow-wave activity specifically declines. If we begin stimulating slow-wave sleep earlier in life, can we slow the decline in slow-wave sleep, and what impact could that have on health?

Everyone is chasing more data and “insights,” but we’ve had bathroom scales for over a century and society is more obese than ever. More data is not the answer.

We believe the next generation of wearables will go beyond collecting data and displaying graphs. They’ll actively influence our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve health on our behalf. We see Affectable Sleep as the beginning of that shift. Affective wearables = Affectables.

In the past we’ve had feedback about using a subscription model. We tested a one-time purchase and had zero sales, even when reaching out to people who said they’d buy if there wasn’t a subscription. It isn’t a money grab; it keeps the hardware accessible and gives the company the long-term stability to keep developing the technology. Other companies such as Dreem, Philips, and Frenz all went with one-time pricing and didn’t survive.

We can’t discuss the stimulation protocol or technical implementation freely on a marketing page for regulatory reasons, but Hacker News is a place for discussing the technology and the business itself, so this felt like the right venue to share it openly.

Happy to answer questions about the data, stimulation methods, or hardware.