No More Sleepless Nights with Dreamlight’s Eye Mask
Several startups at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show focused on displaying products designed to improve people’s quality of sleep. A growing body of scientific research indicates that sleep has important effects on health and well-being. This topic of concern is relatable to most — especially since feeling drained before rolling out of bed has become an integral part of our morning routines.
One company that focuses on getting you better rested is Dreamlight. This startup has just unveiled an eye mask that’s all about helping you catch up on sleep (and improving the quality of it, too). Dreamlight says that its mask can also lessen the effects of jet lag and project infrared light onto your face to help with under-eye circles.
The Dreamlight is a chunky foam eye mask that wraps around your head and attaches via Velcro. Its design is meant to remove pressure from sensitive areas of your face and block out as much light as possible using special inserts. It also has four speakers embedded in its sides, along with an optical heart rate monitor, infrared sensors, accelerometers, and gyroscopes.
To simplify your experience with the mask, just use the accompanying Dreamlight app. Not only will it tell you how long you rested the night before, but you can also program it to wake you up at a certain time. We personally love the fact that the app lets you choose what ambient sounds to play inside the mask as you’re falling asleep.
Dreamlight has teamed up with 23andMe to craft custom sleep profiles based on people’s genetic profiles. Because of this, a custom six-day jetlag plan is readily available to you should you ever experience exhaustion from traveling across several time zones.
For all of the Dreamlight’s innovative features, the crowd favorite seems to be the light inside the mask, which is generated by a set of LED panels. These panels are part of the mask’s sleep program, which stimulates melatonin production in the brain. Once you’ve fastened on the mask, they produce a gentle orange light for fifteen minutes, which in turn illuminates a guide for your breathing. Inhale as the light goes on, and exhale as it goes off.
When it’s time to wake up, the mask will blast increasingly-light green hues over your eyelids. This allows you to comfortably wake up without any abrupt noises coming from your alarm clock. Just in case the loss of an alarm clock is too much to bear for you, the Dreamlight app also gives you the option of enabling them. Pick white noise, light jazz, or rainforest sounds to serve as your morning wakeup call.
“Once I was ready to go to sleep, I strapped it on, activating a pulsing, warm-colored light and ambient sounds. The Dreamlight rep told me I was supposed to match my breath with the pulse of the light, leading my body to relax and fall asleep faster. I was dubious about using light to make me fall asleep, but I got into the rhythm and was out almost instantly. The green light used in the morning was also pleasant to wake up to, and I really did feel rested. For whatever it’s worth, this entire week at CES, the app I normally use to track my sleep, Sleep Cycle, has said my quality of sleep has hovered around 70 percent. The night I used the Dreamlight mask, Sleep Cycle said my quality of sleep was 90 percent,” says Dani Deahl, a Dreamlight reviewer.
Founder Wlll Wu claims that the eye mask will last up to four nights when fully charged. It’s recommended that you stay on top of charging the eye mask, though, as streaming music on it from your smartphone will lessen its battery life significantly.
The smart eye mask is about to be launched on Indiegogo later this month. The masks will be starting at $100, but there is currently no word on when shipment will take place.
