Revolutionizing Sleep: A Dream or Nightmare?
People live busy lives. Several obligations tie people down: family, work, education, social groups, and other factors impact one’s survivability. Everyone manages these factors differently, and as in regular adulthood, many hours are spent to ensure that one can keep up with time. Those hours we take advantage of to fulfill responsibilities often eat away at one of the most vital self-care routines: sleep. Insomniacs now have become a norm as we must tolerate an ever-engaging life, but sleeplessness negatively affects our livelihood. Simple suggestions to improve sleep such as trying to prioritize sleep, adjusting time-management, or other methods may be impossible for some. But what if there were other ways to enhance sleep, given the capabilities of what technology could do?
In a hypothetical world or future in which ubiquitous technology has become lucrative, I present to you the DeepDozer. My imagining of the DeepDozer consists of a system meant to accommodate sleep in many functions. The DeepDozer itself will be an embedded microchip implanted in your hand that will help sleeplessness. The controller of the DeepDozer will be the associated DeepDozer app, allowing different configurations as you please. In response to insomnia, users can adjust the DeepDozer to fall asleep faster, even by adjusting how soon they would want to begin sleeping. This is executed by artificially creating melatonin for your body to respond to or the DeepDozer to be a catalyst for your melatonin to rise.
Other than assisting with falling asleep faster, the DeepDozer will improve the effectiveness of sleep. Regular sleep consists of stages of an ongoing cycle of both rapid-eye-movement sleep (REM) and non-REM sleep continuously circling for the many hours one decides to rest. The DeepDozer will not directly intervene with changing a person’s sleep cycles entirely, but rather complement one’s regular cycles with additional support. During times when one is in non-REM sleep, the separate stages within non-REM sleep are enhanced. The DeepDozer will help each stage’s efficiency and stages’ transitional phases between each non-REM sleep stage so they are smoother and deeper. Therefore, one can rest better, especially since non-REM sleep is more recognized as the sleep stage giving your shut-eye the restorative properties sleep is supposed to do.
When someone falls into REM sleep, extreme brain wave activity occurs where dreams may happen and increase creativity. The DeepDozer will assist in this phase of sleep similarly to how it aids non-REM sleep. In REM sleep, DeepDozer would adapt to the brain activity, and decide whether to allow more waves to be generated or less, depending on what is effective for the person. Transitions from non-REM to REM sleep and REM sleep back to non-REM sleep will flow easier as well.
The final part of sleep is ensuring that you can tell by tomorrow morning that the sleep paid off the hours you spent. The DeepDozer will lastly safeguard that you wake up naturally, and not through the aggravating alarm noise of your phone. DeepDozer will help align your body’s biological clock and circadian rhythms with your sleep so that awaking from your slumber feels refreshing.
The controls for all 3 of these functions can be changed on the DeepDozer app, which also hosts tracking data on how your sleep cycles have been. Your sleep cycles are recorded based on sensors built into the DeepDozer microchip. Several graphs of your sleep are visualized, and you can compare results from the past other days you have slept to see overall how DeepDozer has enriched your rest. Through the app, you can let the DeepDozer learn how to best aid you through all functions through machine learning. After some initial learning of your sleep cycles, you can alter the functions’ specifications to experiment if the default enhancements are not successful.
Conceptually, the DeepDozer has a plethora of extensive implications as a technology and how it could be created aside from being a miracle product of imagination. As one of the greatest fears with this innovation, users are likely alerted immediately that the DeepDozer will integrate with your body, specifically working with your brain. Is technology powering over yourself an extreme concern, or entirely rational? Most people would think this understanding as valid, though entrenching one’s body through technological assistance is a regular occurrence in specific use cases today, often for people with disabilities and other related situations. These technologies employ the growing field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), where medical studies merge with engineering. As far back as 2006, microchips have been proven to artificially renew, fix, or build old motor pathways and movement when tested with animals.
Over time, thoughts of when people could become cyborgs for legitimate purposes are slowly being illustrated in our reality through using BCIs. Current developments up to today have answered back at rebuttals that disapprove of technological embedding in humanity. For example, previous aggravations to implanting technology into bodies included the worry of the painful surgeries associated with computer integration. However, Synchron managed to transplant the Stentrode neural interface to patients without open surgery. Other arguments for the reliability and practicality of these inventions have been acknowledged by BCI developers, where without these considerations, BCIs like the DeepDozer cannot be fully engrained for the mass public.
Before we can even envision a future where everyone has installed devices to their livelihoods optimally, there are present-day instances where BCIs and general accessibility gadgets are incompatible with their intended users and are sometimes out of their control. Prior corporation Second Sight had hundreds of participants be test subjects for their continuous vision implants, only for the users to be stranded when the company diminished. Without support from the businesses who provided you a shred of light of having a normal human experience, participants are left in worse conditions from whence they began. The financial burden when getting these devices compared to the application of said products may be regrettable, too.
If modern BCIs cannot be created fittingly for populations who need them most, why try to invent them for a regular user? What could our future be if BCIs like the DeepDozer where a commonplace occurrence, without these justifications being focused on? Many past media of design fiction and other categorizations have depicted picturesque dystopias highlighting sociotechnical aspects impactful to our wellbeing. Some of the past anxieties people anticipated are currently being seen now. Plenty of the logistics deriving from technologies’ influences are already being theorized and portrayed now also.
Some of the background design choices of the DeepDozer address the ongoing issues with BCIs, such as having the microchip be easily planted or removed by the user as they please. Couplings of multiple components to make the system work are assimilated to work with existing and relied on smartphones. As expected with any technology meanwhile, privacy troubles would flourish in understanding human bodies. The mass complications of security control demonstrated in social media from big tech companies are already intrusive. If taking this knowledge further in the context of the DeepDozer, one could see how blurry the line, if any line existed, is for your safety. Imagine a hacker having the chance to put you to sleep without you knowing, or allowing you to sleep for an eternity? Without the DeepDozer ensuring these outcomes would not occur, there is no reason why this would be on shelves to be sold.
After diving further into what the creation of the DeepDozer would entail, do the benefits of it outweigh the detriments? These questions can be answered now, though when technology could truly make the DeepDozer, perhaps the raised apprehensions of BCIs would be fully resolved by then. Maybe our current expectations of the future become true instead. Nonetheless, whether you would favor the DeepDozer or find it impractical, awareness of technology’s revolving difficulties is imperative to your livelihood. Rest assured now, and it may seem that resolving your insomnia is better when done alone.
