Do you have trouble sleeping? Join the crowd. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, as many as 70 million American adults are affected by sleep disorders that are detrimental to their workplace performance, health and quality of life.
Israeli startup Dayzz is launching a personalized sleep-training app meant primarily as a service for self-insured employers to offer employees for enhancing sleep quality while reducing healthcare and employer costs.
“There is a very high linkage between good sleep, health and productivity,” Dayzz CEO Amir Inditzky tells ISRAEL21c. “Today, 20 to 30 percent of the population has some kind of sleep disorder causing them to suffer from insufficient sleep. This has a huge economic impact.”
Working in collaboration with international sleep experts since July 2017, Inditzky and his team in Herzliya built a research-based sleep assessment platform using subjective and objective data crunched by big-data analysis to identify each user’s specific sleep problem — sleep apnea or a circadian rhythm disturbance, for example — and devise a personalized sleep-training plan.
Inditzky says the diagnostic function is the main factor that differentiates Dayzz from existing sleep-training apps.
A second factor, he says, is that the Dayzz app not only shows you how much deep, light, and REM sleep you’re getting but puts that information in context. “When I found out that I was getting 2.5 hours of deep sleep I thought that sounded bad and I didn’t know what to do with that data,” he says. “We give smart insights from our algorithm so the data is more accessible and more usable.”
Finally, Dayzz bases its recommendations on sleep experts’ understanding that one approach alone is not likely to solve your problem.
“If you have insomnia and you are using relaxation, yoga or mediation, sleep hygiene or a nutrition solution, each might be great but because the human body is a complex machine you may need to do more than one of these. We collect a lot of solutions and mix them in a smart way to fit the specific user,” says Inditzky, who has 15 years of ecommerce experience behind him. “As you progress, the plan is adapted so that it’s always relevant.”
Clinical psychologist and sleep specialist Dr. Mairav Cohen-Zion works with Dayzz, while scientific advisers are Prof. Giora Pillar, director of the sleep clinic at Clalit Health Services in Haifa; and Prof. Alan Schwartz, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore.
Android and iOS alpha versions of the Dayzz app will be soft-launched on the respective app stores in September to help the company gather enough user data for quality-assurance testing and optimization. The eventual goal is a hard launch in early 2019 for companies, which will pay per user per month.
“This is a common business model in employee wellness programs,” says Inditzky. “In some cases we will sell our product directly to employers and in some cases we will distribute it through digital aggregators.”
Dayzz is a subsidiary of Maabarot Products, a company located on Kibbutz Ma’abarot near Netanya.
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