Clinical Studies

We conducted a 3+ year sleep study in our advanced sleep lab in Berkeley, CA and a home pilot with over 1,500 nights of data. Both our sleep study and our pilot were blind, controlled research studies that were overseen by our Scientific Advisory Board and approved by an independent Institutional Review Board.

Lab results

Our controlled sleep lab studies were conducted with adult participants, age 30-70. Each participant had at least two sleep sessions, one of which was a sham session (like a placebo – a session where they slept without the stimulation we were evaluating). Sleep activity was recorded using laboratory-grade EEG and EKG systems, and was scored by a certified polysomnography technician, using the same approach as any medical sleep lab.

Somnee uses personalized stimulation that gets better as it learns your brain rhythms and sleeping patterns.

Personalization enables faster sleep onset. Data from a sham-controlled real-world study, n=55 participants, 1,800+ nights.

Over 4x the effectiveness of Melatonin

The charts below show a comparison of Somnee’s effect on sleep from our most recent sleep lab study (n=31) and real-world study (n=55) with the published results for melatonin. On average, Somnee is 4x the effectiveness of a melatonin pill in improving sleep efficiency and duration.

Improvements in sleep efficiency

Improvements in sleep duration

Improvements in responder rate

Additional research

Personalized transcranial alternating current stimulation improves sleep quality. V. Ayanampudi, V.Kumar, A.Krishnan, M.P. Walker, R.B. Ivry, R.T. Knight, R. Gurumoorthy.

Safety meta-review of transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) studies finds zero serious adverse effects across over 8,000 participants and 18,000 sessions.

Old Brains Come Uncoupled in Sleep: Slow Wave-Spindle Synchrony, Brain Atrophy, and Forgetting. Helfrich, R.F., Mander, B.A., Jagust, W.J, Knight, R.T. and Walker, M. Neuron, 97:1-10, 2018. PMID: 29249289.

Sleep as a potential biomarker of tau and beta-amyloid burden in the human brain. Winer, J.R., Mander, B.A., Helfrich, R.F., Maass, A., Harrison, T.M., Baker, S.L, Knight, R.T., Jagust, W.J. and Walker, M.P. Journal of Neuroscience, doi.org/10.1523/JNEUOSCI.0503-19.2019, 2019. PMID: 31209175.

Bidirectional prefrontal-hippocampal dynamics organize information transfer during sleep in humans. Helfrich, R.F., Lendner, J.D., Mander, B.A., Guillen, H., Paff, M., Mnatsakanyan, L., Vadeera, S., Walker, M.P., Lin, J.J. and Knight, R.T. Nature Communications, doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-11444-x, 10(1): 1-16, 2019. PMID: 31395890.

Aperiodic sleep networks promote memory consolidation. Helfrich, R.F., Lendner, J.D. and Knight, R.T. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2175: 1-12, 2021.

Human REM sleep controls neural excitability in support of memory formation. Lendner, J.D., Niethard, N., Mander, B.A., van Schalkwijk, F.J., Schuh-hofer, S., Schmidt, H., Knight, R.T., Born, J., Walker, M.P., Lin, J.J. and Helfrich, R.F. Scientific Advances, doi:10.1126/sciadvj1895, 9:34,1-16, 2023.