Dreem announces the winners of our first Call for Proposals

This week, Dreem announced the winners of our first Call for Proposals at the World Sleep Congress in Vancouver. The call for proposals was designed to reward innovative research projects that use sleep endpoints.

The study of sleep endpoints has traditionally been restricted to a clinical setting by the dependency on polysomnography (PSG). Long considered the gold standard in sleep measurement and analysis, the PSG is, while accurate, costly, time-consuming, uncomfortable and non-ambulatory. Constraints that greatly limit the duration of a study and impact the measurements taken as patients often have difficulty getting used to wearing it.  Dreem believes that the lightweight, portable, precise sleep measuring Dreem headband can change this, taking research out of the laboratory and generating longitudinal data in the field.

Eden Debellemanière from the Dreem Research team explains, “The aim of this initiative was to promote research projects that would otherwise be impossible without a sleep measurement device like Dreem. We are enabling projects that will leverage our solution for large scale studies that normally would not possible be with PSG.”

The projects were reviewed by the Dreem Scientific Advisory Board: Professors Emmanuel Mignot, Raphael Heinzer, Christof Koch and Russell Foster and judged on several criteria such as scientific rationale, significance, innovation, approach, environment and timeline. Raphael Heinzer explains: “It is amazing to see so many centers of excellence interested in using the Dreem research solution. The projects are of high quality. Making our final choices was tough”.

The winners are… 

•  Jerome Siegel from the University of California, Los Angeles (US) will be awarded with 20 headbands for his project on the environmental determinants of human sleep, a study on San, Hadza and Tsimane hunter-gatherers.
• Rebecca Robillard from the University of Ottawa (Canada) will be awarded with 40 headbands for her project on the multi-systemic monitoring of patients with insomnia and potentiation of slow oscillations during sleep in these patients.
• Richa Saxena, Joyita Dutta and Dimitrios Pantazis from the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) will be awarded with 20 headbands for the development of sleep-based biomarkers for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
   

And there’s more

Given the sheer volume of high-quality proposals, Dreem also awarded headbands to three other particularly promising projects: 

• Katherine Sharkey and her collaborators from Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the Brown University School for Public Health (US) will be awarded with 15 headbands for their work on the longitudinal sleep study of women during pregnancy and the postpartum period.
• Elizabeth Coulthard and her collaborators from Bristol University (UK) will be awarded with 10 headbands for their work on the understanding of sleep, circadian rhythms and dopamine in neurodegenerative disease.
• Zanna Voysey, Alpar Lazar and Roger Barker from the University of Cambridge (UK) will be awarded with 5 headbands for their pilot work on longitudinal recordings and sleep improvement in patients with Huntington’s disease.

The winning and runner-up projects show the scale and variety of research fields that are concerned by the study of sleep endpoints. By facilitating this process, Dreem is advancing sleep medicine and scientific research.