At Eight Sleep, Research and Development (R&D) is at the heart of our human-centric product features. A key group within this larger team is Clinical Research, which plays a crucial role in the Pod’s ability to track sleep and health data accurately and reliably.
“It is important that members can trust the technology we’re putting out into the world. If we build an algorithm but only test it on 20-year-old males, how will we know it works for a 60-year-old woman? Clinical research allows us to ensure our product does what we say it will.” – Nicole Moyen, Director of Science and Clinical Research at Eight Sleep
Leading the team is Nicole Moyen, PhD, Director of Science and Clinical Research at Eight Sleep and has a background of 10+ years in exercise science, thermoregulation, and cardiovascular health. Nicole has helped develop Clinical Research for other wearable companies like WHOOP and Fitbit and was especially excited to join Eight Sleep.
“At Eight Sleep, I’ve been able to utilize my background in temperature regulation to actually help people improve their sleep,” said Nicole.
“Having the right body temperature for sleep is so important — more important than even I thought it was before I joined the company— and this is something I have studied for over ten years. At Eight Sleep, our team sees firsthand how regulating body temperature during the night improves members’ deep and REM sleep, as well as HR and HRV.”
How Clinical Research impacts your Pod experience
The Clinical team owns the human research testing for any new features developed by R&D and the validation of new hardware and algorithms. Nicole explains:
“For new R&D features, let’s say that we want to develop an algorithm to detect what sleep stage you are in. The Clinical team will review the literature, design the study, and collect the data necessary for algorithm development. Additionally, before each new Pod version hits the market, we do extensive testing to ensure that all of our core metrics, like heart rate & HRV, meet or exceed our accuracy standards.” – Nicole
This team has been instrumental in several recent product accomplishments – including improvements to our HR, HRV, respiratory rate, and sleep classification algorithms, validating new Pod 3 features, and the continuous improvement of our Autopilot feature.
Because of the Clinical team’s research, Eight Sleep members can also look forward to features focused on improving the sleep quality of female members. “Generally, women have worse sleep than men, so I’ve been especially excited about finding ways to improve women’s sleep,” said Moyen.
“The Pod allows us to prescribe temperatures that optimize sleep separately for both men and women. Men and women actually prefer similar skin temperatures during sleep. However, women have cooler skin temperatures compared to men due to their lower metabolism. This means that women need warmer bed temperatures (compared to men) in order to achieve a similar skin temperature during sleep. Additionally, women experience body temperature changes throughout the month with each menstrual cycle, and more dramatically with life events such as pregnancy and menopause. We are excited to develop features down the road that support women throughout their life, no matter what they’re going through.”
Keep an eye out for many more exciting features to come, thanks to Nicole and the Clinical Team.
If you’re interested in joining Eight Labs and participating in future studies, please email: rd.clinical@eightsleep.com to get added to the mailing list.
