Zeo

Zeo makes home health products for sleep management. They provide both an Internet service to monitor and collect your data as well as devices that detect your sleep patterns. They are perhaps the only consumer device that will measure various sleep cycles. The devices invariably include a headband and some sort of receiver whether it be a receiver they make or in the case of Zeo pro and pro+ your smart phone.
I think hands down this is the most reliable device to measure your sleep patterns and the ZEO score is actually useful for quantifying your sleep and giving you an idea of whether you are sleeping well. For the average consumer this device probably measure sleep better than any other consumer device out there as most devices do not give you detailed data on the sleep cycles.
I am a physician, but not a sleep expert. My review is negative not because the device is bad, but because of specific issues.
Bluetooth radiation is NOT good for you and to the best of my knowledge there is no way to turn off the bluetooth while it is measuring your sleep pattern. Why is this bad for you? The radiation is pulsed and it is sitting on your forehead irradiating your frontal cortex. Here’s a consumer level review that will give you an idea of the problem.
. Keep in mind that you will have just elevated the problem if you are having a cell phone near your bed that is also irradiating you. Longterm effects on your brain are not likely to be good and for sensitive people potentially quite hazardous to your sleep health. Ideally you would at least TURN OFF your phone and turn it on after you are done sleeping.
Customer Service is nonexistent. You can’t reach a person over there and all queries now go to FAQ’s which never answer the tough questions like the one raised here on Bluetooth. Even the help forum is down a lot. I also returned a unit for repair and after months of queries NEVER got it back. Never even received a reply. That is sad. I got another unit to test.
If you are hoping to run this data by your sleep doctor. Good Luck. Doc’s really aren’t interested. Why? ZEO does not provide any good information on how they define and detect their sleep cycles. Now while REM presumably is REM sleep, none of the sleep doctors I spoke to were comfortable with this truly being REM without further definition by ZEO. Zeo’s response? Well they had none. Now they also have something they call Deep Sleep, but try to correlate that with the various NREM cycles and again ZEO is ominously silent. The bar graph provided, while useful doesn’t follow typical sleep monitoring convention. REM would be considered the deepest level of sleep with NREM (presumably Deep Sleep here) being less deep. That’s not how they recorded their graphs (very misleading). So what exactly does Deep Sleep correlate to, which NREM category? Who knows?
Units have a habit of going out of sync or failing to read at times in the night. Often this is because the unit falls off, but quite frequently it’s because, well who knows? The pads probably last longer than the 90 days they are rated for and the head band while uncomfortable is something many get used to. I think they would have done better with a wider band so it stays on the forehead better. So what happens when the unit doesn’t measure anything? You get a big black area on your graph and a huge ding on your ZEO score. ZEO should let you input some type of sleep here so you can keep a better log, but no there is no such option. I have been told that if you nap it will throw out one of the readings from that day and not keep all of them. My experience has been that naps are recorded, but there is NO WAY to aggregate the sleep. If you have to import missing data, you literally have to hit home twice (this is counterintuitive). To reset the time on your device you go to help not settings (again very counterintuitive)
They never bother to tell you how the threshold of whether you are awake or asleep is calculated. Why is this important? Well, because sleep apnea patients wake up during REM for short periods of time. This causes intense stress on the body, but the apneic episodes may only last 10 – 20 seconds. If the ZEO unit misses this then it records a wonderful night of sleep for someone who isn’t really sleeping well at all. This is terribly misleading. They also don’t provide info on how your ZEO score & % was calculated and how you might correct or add missing sleep or naps.
No customer service, no working help forum, RF irradiation risk, FAQ’s that don’t answer hard questions or get back to you. I want to give them a higher score, but I can’t even though I think this is a good device.