Insomnia app Sleepio

Insomnia app Sleepio wins start competition at Wired Health | video (Wired UK)









Sleepio, a web and mobile app that delivers personalised cognitive behavioural therapy for insomniacs, has won the Wired Health Bupa Startup competition.



The company's cofounder Peter Hames started the company after experiencing the condition firsthand five years ago. Having studied experimental psychology, he knew that one of the best options for him would be cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). All attempts at being prescribed this were stonewalled by doctors that only wanted to administer sleeping pills. Determined, Hames bought himself a self-help book penned by sleep expert and now Oxford professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Colin Espie. Within six weeks, he was sleeping well.



"It was an incredible experience personally, and opened my eyes to what is frankly an insane situation," Hames told the audience at Wired Health. "Billions of people suffer from behavioural problems we know have solutions for." Despite this, doctors continue to first prescribe drugs for insomnia, anxiety and depression -- it's the first port of call when compared with the more costly and time-consuming one-on-one CBT sessions the healthcare system would offer.



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Hames realised, there must be a way to disrupt this pattern of poor treatment, and deliver behavioural-based medicine in a scalable and affordable way. He partnered with Professor Espie to create Sleepio, an app the Wired judging panel unanimously voted the winner.



Together they carried out the first placebo-controlled randomised trial of a self-administered CBT option, building a fake system for the process. "It proved to be incredibly effective," Hames said. "Even those suffering from poor sleep for ten years, within weeks were falling asleep 50 percent faster and 60 percent longer, and daily measurements for energy were up by over 50 percent." The paper was published in The Lancet and has been well received across the field and is featured on the NHS website. It's also partnered with Jawbone, and can extract sleep straight from the device for a more seamless user experience.



The interface itself features The Prof and his friendly narcoleptic dog Pavlov, who will pop up if you can't sleep at night with some kind words and advice for checking out your relaxation plan.



"The morning after, an hour after you get out of bed, he'll say 'I'm so sorry you woke up, it happens to the best of us. Why don't you fill in your diary while it's fresh in your mind.' It attempts to mimic bits that work -- if we can humanise the experience, Tamagotchi-style, there are potentially huge rewards to get people to stick with the problem."



The app, Hames says, presents an example for how we can start to build companies to size and scale, without drugs, with the potential to challenge big pharma. To the benefit of millions.



"We're on the cusp of a revolution," he said. "I believe one way or another tracking health will become a normal part of everyday life. It gives us opportunities to build interventions we've never had the opportunity to consider before, tailored to a person's profile.



"That's nothing less than tipping behavioural science on its head, which is typically constrained by delivery -- face to face interventions once a week or so. Building those evidence-based behavioural interventions is what we're engaged in."















Link: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-04/29/sleepio-wired-health





Insomnia app Sleepio wins startup competition at Wired Health | video (Wired UK):



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