
NeuroOn, the smart sleep mask: not a medical device, but better than a coin toss - stared
https://alxd.org/neuroon-analysis-results.html
======
aresant
Amazon marketplace, kickstarter, and etsy have unleashed a FIREHOSE of pseudo-
medical products (And other consumer products) that review systems and
regulators are just not equipped to handle.

A startup that I wish would happen would be a truly NON biased review
organization - eg consumer reports but for the internet age.

Not just a consumer reports as digital first but an organization that is able
to respond to the deluge of new products & product claims we see as consumers.

We were recently trying to buy a foam mattress and immediately got sucked into
this huge vortex of misinformation to the point that I just gave up.

On the one side you have "mommy bloggers" yelling "tempurpedic offgasses give
you CANCER!" and linking to a group of similar non-scientific studies.

On the other end is a group that says "latex is the only all natural foam!!!!"
but then links to amazon products made in Thailand / etc full of mispellings /
no oversight / etc.

Or the recent expose of how truffle oils (1) don't actually contain truffles.

It's insanity!

Clearly the FTC isn't the solution @ this point to oversee consumer
protection.

(1)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453103)

~~~
jameslk
I'm actually working on exactly this currently. It's called Praisee. We're
trying to focus just on the review and product decision making side of things,
with a heavy emphasis on community, trust and personalization.

Amazon is not a reviews service, nor is YouTube, yet this is where people
turn. Nobody else seems to be taking the issue seriously, so we are.

The hardest part of building something like this is the chicken and egg
problem, which is why I don't think there exists a good service for this yet.
It's actually really hard to find a group of trustable product reviewers who
stay engaged. People don't buy reviewable things that often, so you need
another hook to get them to come back and sustain the ecosystem. This has been
the hardest part of getting traction for our startup.

We're working hard on the problem. Hopefully you'll hear more about us soon.

~~~
Mathnerd314
> It's actually really hard to find a group of trustable product reviewers who
> stay engaged.

There's a ton of bloggers and paid reviewers:
[http://www.productreviewmom.com/2013/11/how-to-become-
produc...](http://www.productreviewmom.com/2013/11/how-to-become-product-
review-blogger.html). All you need is a way to aggregate the one or two
complaints / solid facts per review while filtering out all the fluff
promotion verbiage. Mining truth, in other words.

~~~
jameslk
It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure if that information is usually
structured enough to distill objective facts and criticisms. Are we talking
about using NLP to pull out those details? I think the tech might not be quite
there yet, but maybe there's a better way that I'm not familiar with.

~~~
Mathnerd314
Yeah, NLP. I was thinking of a version of
[http://newsblaster.cs.columbia.edu/](http://newsblaster.cs.columbia.edu/)
(now open-source:
[https://github.com/kedz/newsblaster](https://github.com/kedz/newsblaster)).
That code doesn't use sentiment analysis or word/phrase vectors so there's
significant room for improvement by borrowing ideas from other research. Of
course, the amount of improvement is uncertain, so I'm not sure if it
translates into a startup per se.

It's probably lower-risk to target a specific segment and do in-depth reviews,
e.g. [https://examine.com/about/](https://examine.com/about/) is apparently
quite profitable ([http://www.solorwell.com/examine-com-is-grown-
up-700000-in-t...](http://www.solorwell.com/examine-com-is-grown-up-700000-in-
the-past-year/)), and Grokstyle is doing interior design
([http://www.ldv.co/blog/2016/5/30/grokstyle-wins-ldv-
vision-s...](http://www.ldv.co/blog/2016/5/30/grokstyle-wins-ldv-vision-
summit-2016) [https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~sbell/pdf/siggraph2015-bell-
bala...](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~sbell/pdf/siggraph2015-bell-bala.pdf)).
But that sort of site will never cover everything, or even a significant
fraction of products, so there's lots of room for value-added reviews. I
envision a site like [https://reviewmeta.com/](https://reviewmeta.com/), but
with more emphasis on information extraction (& actual reviews) instead of
machine learning (ML metrics don't help much when comparing products; to
really corner the market the flow needs to be review site -> Amazon rather
than the reverse).

~~~
Mathnerd314
For an concrete example let's take garlic peelers (a typical "long-tail"
product). The top search results are e-commerce sites, affiliate reviews,
Cook's Illustrated, WikiHow, a 1996 NYT article describing its invention, and
a Kickstarter campaign to reinvent the garlic peeler. Finally somewhere on
page 2-3 is this review site: [https://moo.review/garlic-
peelers/](https://moo.review/garlic-peelers/).

They clearly spent some effort on this; it's all original content, nice
pictures, good layout, etc. But as a person buying a garlic peeler, it's
pretty much unusable due to the lack of editing; spelling errors such as
"realy", the majority of the page taken up by a how-to, and tons of fluff such
as "Some of the peelers presented more problems than they solved." There's
about one paragraph per item.

Meanwhile, Amazon reviews are composed mostly of worse fluff ("amazing",
"excellent", "I use it every day", etc.), and there's more of it. But there is
also the occasional interesting complaint such as "The interior has to be
cleaned after 2-3 uses due to garlic juice." and "The rolling motion gave my
friend arthritis". Definitely more than a paragraph of info, maybe even two or
three. So the info is there, it's just a problem of extracting it.

------
alxd_org
If you have any questions about my blogpost or NeuroOn experiment story, I'll
be happy to address them.

I have been already notified that I may have misinterpreted actigraphy
publications I cited - I'll look into that tomorrow and gladly update the post
with my findings :)

~~~
digler999
my question is why do you make false assertions such as this:

"it could try to wake the user, resulting in grogginess and complete lack of
energy till the end of the day". you cite source [4], which is the wikipedia
article on "sleep inertia" :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia)

The wikipedia page doesn't say you'll have a "complete lack of energy till the
end of the day", or anything _close_ to that. it says "Morning sleep inertia
may take several hours to dissipate" and "Sleep inertia is the impaired
cognitive performance immediately upon awakening, which decays over tens of
minutes", and "In the majority of cases, morning sleep inertia is experienced
for 15 to 30 minutes after waking".

so my question is, whose idea was it to embellish using the phrases "complete
lack of energy" and "for the rest of the day" ?

~~~
alxd_org
Thank you for pointing that out, I will update it in a moment.

I've written a dozen versions of this article trying to accommodate different
readers, including non-technical startup community. One of the main functions
of NeuroOn is its alarm clock, which promises to "always wake you up in the
best moment", which seems not to be true in ~31% of cases.

When I used direct wording about "sleep inertia", my test readers with no
background in sleep science just said "Meh, it's better than without the mask
anyway, isn't it?".

It's an honest mistake on my part, which only shows how hard science
communication really is - and how hard is to choose a language in debunking
bold claims.

------
comboy
I miss zeo so much :| It was easily hackable, it had a serial interface and
apart from scripting your own alarm clock you could e.g. train meditation by
looking at the realtime chart. I wish there was a comparable product (that
also does not depend on cloud).

Lucid dreaming induction function in neuroon looks pretty neat though.

~~~
alxd_org
Have you tried OpenBCI? [http://openbci.com/](http://openbci.com/)

It's not standardized - so you'll have to make a headband yourself and choose
some electrodes, but it gives you full access to all the signals. And don't
worry about the 250/125Hz limitation, it can be quite easily hacked to write
to SD with much better sampling rate.

~~~
comboy
Haven't heard of it. Looks quite promising. Price for the board doesn't seem
to be too bad either given the ADC used. Definitely not something to sleep in,
but could be an interesting time sink. Have you? And did you maybe do any
nouroon like experiments with some other devices?

~~~
alxd_org
Sadly, not many. I'm doing a lot of other things, being a front end developer
full-time ;)

I've played with OpenBCI and with some friends we tried to make it save
signals with 1kHz sampling rate. No big-scale experiments so far.

Two days ago I checked out Myo on a friend born without a hand, with some
hopes to create a simple interface based on her "phantom limb" gestures (she
has full forearm with normal enough muscles). Sadly, Myo doesn't allow access
to raw EMG signal - and my idea is to create Myo-like open hardware electrode
boards to connect with OpenBCI and get some serious signals.

EDIT: Regarding OpenBCI - it's open hardware, you can make it yourself for
~under $100 if I'm right.

~~~
mattkrause
I'm pretty sure OpenBCI has an EMG board, called MyoWave.

~~~
alxd_org
Haven't heard about MyoWave. Do you mean the Ganglion Board?

~~~
mattkrause
Found it! It's actually called MyoWare:

[http://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage/products/myowa...](http://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage/products/myoware-
muscle-sensor?variant=29472011267)

It's a little 3-lead EMG sensor intended for use with arduinos and the like.
It's not _quite_ as nice as the Myo (it uses sticky electrodes), but it's a
similar form factor and much cheaper.

------
BatFastard
Is there any data on the lucid dreaming aspect of NeuroOn?

What percentage of people have lucid dreaming using it? Are those people
experienced lucid dreamer already? Just this aspect alone is enough to gain my
interest.

Also how is it for side sleepers? Ever since my motorcycle accident I can only
sleep on my side.

~~~
alxd_org
There is no data that I know of, haven't heard about any papers from NeuroOn,
they aren't very fond of whitepapers. As to real science on the topic, you can
check
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012001614)

As someone who used NeuroOn I can't see anything wrong with using it sleeping
on the side. It's still uncomfortable (to me), but it's not a deal-breaker.

