Sleep Technology

  I was a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and had the pleasure of working with George Sacher. At the time, he was president of the Gerontological Society of America and had spent his life working on ways to increase lifespan. He was a proponent of hormesis, the idea that moderation was the path to a longer life. Of course, some things should be off the list, like a moderate amount of murder. 

Richard A. Bonato, PhD, RPSGT, is presenting the breakout session “The Role of Dental Devices in Sleep Medicine” at the AAST 2018 Annual Meeting, Sept. 28-30, 2018, in Indianapolis. We caught up with Dr. Bonato to discuss his background and the future of sleep medicine.

While You Were Sleeping: What Sleep Technologists Need to Know This Week Your media watchdog for headlines and trends relevant to sleep technology and patient education.  

Sleep spindles are an information processing and transferring feature of the sleeping brain. With that in mind, AAST gathered together leading sleep-care professionals to discuss hot topics in the field — transferring information from them to you. AAST board member Allen Boone, RPSGT, RST, CCRA, CCRC, hosts this four-part video series, starting with an interview with fellow board members Julie DeWitte, RST, RPSGT, RCP, and Kristina Weaver, EMPT-P, RPSGT, on the topic of primary care physicians versus sleep specialists.

Recently, I have been reading the book “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker, Ph.D. He not only has a passion for all things sleep, but he has a superb knack for explaining the subject matter in a very friendly and easy-to-understand manner. This is a gift for a writer of science when one is trying to reach a large audience and improve health issues by explaining such sleep topics as “synaptogenesis,” which he whittles down to a definition of “the creation of millions of wiring links, or synapses between neurons” and “an overenthusiastic first pass at setting up the mainframe of a brain” of an infant.

While You Were Sleeping: What Sleep Technologists Need to Know This Week Your media watchdog for headlines and trends relevant to sleep technology and patient education.  

The advent of actigraphy in the 1990s made it possible to indirectly record a person’s sleep-wake cycles based on the person’s activity level, with increased activity indicating wakefulness and decreased activity indicating sleep. In actigraphy, a device — an actigraph — which is typically worn on the wrist, continually records movement data over a prolonged time — one week or more. 

While You Were Sleeping: What Sleep Technologists Need to Know This Week Your media watchdog for headlines and trends relevant to sleep technology and patient education.  

This is the second in a series of articles dealing with the changing landscape of sleep technology. In this article, we’ll take a brief look at our present understanding of sleep as well as review some of the technology we use in our sleep centers.

While You Were Sleeping: What Sleep Technologists Need to Know This Week Your media watchdog for headlines and trends relevant to sleep technology and patient education.