By Dr. Scott Bressler, PhD
After months of development, iteration, and testing, we’re excited to announce a major step forward: on April 30th, sleep data will begin populating in the Elemind app.
This isn’t just a feature launch - it’s the beginning of a new kind of sleep insight. One grounded not in surface-level tracking, but in neuroscience, direct brainwave measurement, and transparency.
Here’s what that means, and how we got here.
From EEG to Insight: What Makes Elemind Different
Traditional sleep trackers lean heavily on indirect signals like movement or heart rate. While these are useful proxies, they’re not direct measurements of what’s actually happening in the brain.
Elemind takes a different approach: we use EEG (electroencephalography) to read your brain activity directly as you sleep. By doing so, we can provide data that more accurately reflects what stage of sleep you’re in - wake, light, deep, or REM.
This is the same method used in clinical sleep labs to perform polysomnography, often considered the gold standard of sleep staging. While we don’t capture every sensor that a full clinical study would, our deep learning models, trained on labeled EEG data, allow us to estimate your sleep stages with high accuracy from a single-channel wearable.
Starting April 30th, Elemind customers will see those sleep stages directly in their app.
What You’ll See in the App
Once the app is updated and the headband firmware refreshed (a quick process that takes just a few minutes), sleep sessions will begin appearing automatically the morning after each use. Users will see:
- Hypnograms showing how your brain transitions through different stages of sleep over time.
- Metrics like time to fall asleep, total sleep time, sleep efficiency, and more.
- Trends on daily, weekly, and monthly timescales, helping you understand how your habits and behaviors impact your sleep patterns.
- Restlessness indicators to give a sense of sleep fragmentation or disruption.
We’ve also taken care to avoid oversimplification. There’s no “sleep score” here, and that’s intentional. Rather than assign a single number to your night, we show you the data as it is, so you can interpret it on your terms, not ours.
The Philosophy: No Scores, Just Science
As we explained in our earlier blog post, there’s growing awareness in the sleep science community about the pitfalls of gamifying sleep. Oversimplified metrics can backfire, especially when users begin to chase “perfect scores” at the expense of natural sleep behavior - a phenomenon that researchers have dubbed Orthosomnia.
Instead, we provide raw and derived metrics in clear visual formats like hypnograms and bar charts, paired with context that helps you interpret them. You’ll see how long you were in each sleep stage, how efficiently you slept, and how your sleep changes over time, all without being reduced to a grade.
This approach reflects the reality: sleep is complex. And while we’re proud of the precision in our algorithms, we also want to leave space for your own understanding, preferences, and intuition.
What’s Next: Going Beyond Metrics
This launch is just the beginning. On our roadmap are additional features designed to bring deeper clarity into your brain at night, including:
- Spectrograms – time-frequency plots that show how the dominant brainwave frequencies change over time, giving a rich visual picture of the brain’s nightly rhythm.
- Deep Sleep Stimulation – Decades of research suggest that supporting slow wave sleep, the brain’s most restorative stage, may promote cognitive performance and immune function. Elemind is exploring non-invasive approaches such as closed-loop auditory stimulation to gently modulate deep sleep oscillations in real time. Our goal: to work with the brain’s natural rhythms to enhance the quality of sleep.
These tools reflect our core belief: better understanding leads to better sleep. And better sleep changes everything.
A Note on Setup
Once the app update goes live, users will be prompted to install a firmware update to their headband. This ensures compatibility with our new analytics engine. After that, you’re good to go.
A couple of tips:
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Wear the headband all night for the most complete picture.
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Make sure it fits snugly so the EEG sensors maintain good contact throughout the session.
Without consistent contact, the algorithm won’t be able to generate accurate insights.
A Shared Milestone
This release represents not just a new capability for the product, but a milestone for everyone who’s been part of the Elemind community. Our original beta users helped us refine the science, improve the experience, and shape what this platform has become.
We’re incredibly excited to share this next phase with customers. We hope everyone will explore their data, ask questions, share insights, and as always, let us know how we can make it even better.
Sleep is deeply personal. Now, your sleep data is too.