- Unless we're talking about headphones, electronics are your head typically look pretty stupid.
But today, we're here to normalize sleep monitoring devices that you wear on your head.
It's a headband. It's called the Dreem 2.
Okay, there's probably two different kinds of people who are clicking on this video.
One type of person just wants to see me open up this weird thing and talk about
what I know about it. The other type of person wants to know a lot about the Dreem 2 device.
Maybe this person's a body hacker. Maybe this person has a sleep condition,
like when you flail your limbs around and wake yourself up,
or you have apnea or insomnia. That person might be a little disappointed
because I only used this for 10 nights,
and I don't have any of those conditions. So this is not gonna be a deep dive
about body hacking or biometrics, and I haven't used the Oura Ring or anything like that.
But I can tell you what this thing feels like to sleep in
and where and how the app is, and some stuff, so stick around because, you know, I'm a nice guy.
Here you go. Dreem 2. There's two boxes here.
One is the headband itself, and one is a charging dock.
Now, I don't know what happened here at the office, but I went home with only one box.
I didn't have the charger, but fortunately, as we're going to find out,
there is a USB charging cable in here. So let's talk more about those after we see the main unit.
This is the headband. Pretty cool. It's really fabric-ey.
It's light. I believe this is only 130 grams. A lotta people are gonna have a concern about this thing.
"What's it like to sleep in? What sleep positions can I comfortably be in?
Is this thing gonna fly off my head? Is it gonna fit my head?"
I can help you with these questions, 'cause I have a head and my head's been in here.
I found wearing this at night was really no problem.
I found that I could sleep in any position without really any effect.
You know what? Nah, I'm not gonna put it on yet. Let's (laughs) do a tour of it first.
It has electrodes that measure EEG, your brain waves.
They're here on the forehead, so you have to make sure it's flush to your forehead.
I recommend washing your face before bed so this doesn't turn into some kinda gross,
stinky, pimple-inducing helmet. And then there's these polymer electrodes.
They're plastic and flexible. They're on the back. More on those in a bit.
There's also this little adjustment area right here.
I guess these are velcro, so you can put them
at various points on this band. I didn't have to adjust that much at all,
because on top of being able to move those little velcro bits around you can also stretch it.
And inside the box... Oh god. There's adapters for the charger.
This is the wall wart. The American one goes in here.
Inside there box there was also extra adjustment things.
So I believe you can go from 520-millimeter head circumference to 610,
whatever that means. I just left this one on here, but you can see that you can extend
how wide the adjustment band is using these extra...
This is the one for girthy melons. This is the one for little, tiny alien heads.
Nice to have, but I don't know how many people are gonna need those.
Is this? Oh, this comes off.
Oh, that's pretty cool. I guess you could wash this. You know, so it doesn't get too gummied up.
Oh, you can do that with this as well. Okay, that's cool. So that's hygienic, I like that.
And then, in this little box, is just the USB Micro B charger.
Oh my god. I'm all thumbs today! I had a problem with charging.
This thing doesn't really have enough charges for two nights, which actually is kind of okay.
It has enough charges for one night, and if you had this device for a long time,
you would assume that battery capacity is gonna shrink over time, so it's kinda like
they just gave you way more than you need at the beginning, so that if you have it for years you'll still
have a night's worth of battery over a long time,
because you're gonna be charging this to 100%. You're probably gonna plug it in in the morning
and leave it charging all day, so the battery's often gonna be at 100%,
which isn't very good for lithium-ion batteries. Now, the issue that I have, though,
is that if you get to bed and you haven't charged it
and you only have about 40% left, or at 35%,
and you're like, "Well, I'll plug it in while I go brush my teeth and wash my face," that's probably not gonna make a dent.
It's probably not gonna get you enough battery for you to make it through the night. But maybe it could if it wasn't USB Micro B.
If it was USB-C, you know, like my phone... My Pixel 4 charges like 50% in 15 minutes.
Now, this is where I have to have a little disclaimer, though, 'cause I was not using this charging thing,
which I haven't even opened yet. But I've seen it in the marketing, and it looks pretty stylish.
Okay, this thing has its own little plugin to the wall. It's a heavy, basically, like, paperweight.
And it doesn't have a USB port on it.
Oh! I was wondering what these little silver nubs were.
I guess that's pretty cool. And you can see, the headband is so light
that it can be on there in this avant garde kind of physics-defying posture.
Maybe that charges faster than USB-C. I don't know. And also, you can just put this on your nightstand
so it's easy to remember, you take it off, that's just where it goes, and that would be helpful to remember charging it.
Okay, back to what it looks like. The design's weird, right?
Because most of this is just headband. There are sensors in here, yes, and sensors here,
but all the battery and the onboard computer are all in this heavy part,
and that heavy part goes on the top of your head. And since that's the thickest and heaviest part,
it's great for it to be resting right here where you're never gonna be laying on it,
unless you sleep like one of those babies who flattens their head against the ground
and puts their butt in the air. But I grew outta that, and I usually just sleep on my back or side,
and in those postures... You know what? Let's put it on. In those postures, that's unaffected.
You know? Oh, I'm just gonna... I'll just be here.
Or here. Or here. And this is flat enough that it doesn't really matter.
Another nice thing that I did try was using on-ear or over-ear headphones with this.
Your headphone headband can easily go over and,
pretty much, these are so low-profile that having earphones go on there totally works.
This thing does not have any EMF while you're using it.
I mean, I'm not the kinda person that thinks I'm getting coronavirus from 5G,
but if you are, you'll be happy to know that the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals
are completely disabled while this thing is in use. Each night, pair it to your phone via Bluetooth,
and then you set up that, "I'm going to sleep right now,"
you put it on, it severs those connections, and then the rest of the data collection
and analysis of the data, that happens in real time, happens locally onboard with this little computer.
Pretty cool. But the downside of that is that every time
you want to start a night or finish the night
you have to kind of re-pair it to your phone, and it's not as seamless as your Bluetooth headphones
where as soon as they come out of the case your phone's like, ba-dink, "I recognize you,"
and just connects. Instead, you have to open the app, go to a new thing.
Let's say it's a nap, which I've never done. I only used it for sleep.
And then, you see this little exclamation mark? You gotta go, I'm gonna pair it.
Says, "Press the button on the headphone to pair." Okay, it's flashing. The app still hasn't responded.
"Your headband is currently being paired. Your headband is initializing. Successfully paired."
So it takes like 45 seconds every time,
which is kind of annoying. Then you get up in the morning and you wanna see the results,
'cause that's like the most fun part of this thing, and you have to kinda do that again.
A cool thing about Dreem is that when you wake up it gives you these cool cards
about how your sleep was the night before. And you get this right away.
There's a lotta features of the app that you only get after your first week,
so they can kinda collate how you sleep week-to-week
and your tendencies overall on average, but right away, you do get this cool feature,
you get a card for each night. So let's look at Monday, June 22nd,
the last time I used this puppy. Apparently I slept for seven hours.
I got an efficiency of 94%. I don't really know what that means.
It took me 16 minutes to fall asleep. I woke up only once, for two minutes.
And the adherence to my sleep schedule was a three out of five.
You know, it's hard. I try to go to bed at 10. Right now it's summertime. The sun is still out.
And hey, you know what? While I'm spilling my guts, my wife wants to watch "Dark" on Netflix every night.
It's an hour-long show. It's really easy for me to stay up past my bedtime.
I'm sorry, Dreem. Okay, but here's the cooler stuff.
There's sensors on here for measuring your heart rate.
And also your blood saturation level, although I don't think they've implemented that
on the software level yet. They have the sensors for it, but that's still a feature that's coming.
And that will let you know whether you woke up due to respiratory issues.
My average breathing was 17 CPM. What is C...
C's. C's per minute? I don't know what that is.
49 movements. Seven-hour duration. I did some deep sleeping. Some light sleep.
Some REM, that's the light blue. And then you can just check it out, how you went all night.
You can see all these little wake-up moments, and that's 'cause I have a baby sleeping in my room,
and she's a butthole sometimes and wants to eat
in the middle of the night like a god damn bodybuilder. And you can see, as I scroll along,
the little dude here is changing position. I often fall asleep on my left side.
That's something the app told me. I didn't even know that. That's good to know.
Now, if this was all you got from the app, being able to check out how your sleep last night went,
this would totally not be worth the 500 U.S. dollars that it costs.
500 U.S. dollars. This is the equivalent of something like 23andMe,
where you get it and it's cool for like a day,
and then who cares? You never really open it up again. 23andMe is not $500.
It's like $150 or something like that. But that's not all this thing can do.
It also has an integrated alarm clock,
which I actually thought was pretty cool. So what you can do is say, "I wanna wake up at 6:00 a.m.,
because I'm a masochist." You can actually set a window of five to 50 minutes
where the headband is gonna sense, based on your brainwaves, when you're most readily wake-up-able,
so that you can wake up not feeling groggy, but kinda ready to go, you know?
And you're just kinda, "Aw, yeah!" Sit up in bed like a mummy, "Ha!"
Ready to go. You can do that. The issue that I have with that, though,
is that this uses bone conduction audio,
little vibrations in the headband you can hear sound through,
instead of having like an earpiece. And so when it speaks to you, saying like,
"Night started," or like, "Battery charged," that's all through bone conduction,
and so is the alarm clock. And the alarm clock noise that I chose
was some kind of shaker sound, like shick-shick-shick-shick,
but it's pretty quiet and I felt like
I slept through it a lot. And one time, even, my wife was like,
"Uh, hey. Your thing's going off."
So I guess she could hear it but I couldn't. The main claim to fame for this thing
for making your sleep better is that it'll sense when you're in kind of a light sleep
and then play pink noise to make you go into a deeper sleep,
so it can actually improve your sleep. I didn't really see that.
I was pretty consistent throughout. And then there was one night that I had that turned on,
where it seemed to just do the pink noise like all night.
But again, it's quiet enough that it wasn't too disruptive.
Another feature that they have is onset experiences to help you fall asleep.
There's like a meditation thing, or breathing or calming noises,
and I think you can even do them all in succession. I didn't use any of those because
I fall asleep pretty easily, but I have read about people who really struggle to fall asleep, and over time,
got the amount of time it takes them to fall asleep from two hours down to like 20 minutes
consistently over a six-month period, and that is life-changing.
Another concern I have with this thing is that I got a flag in the app
that said that it wasn't collecting data as efficiently as possible,
and I think that has to do with these little polymer electrodes not connecting with my scalp
as clearly as they could. But the thing is, I have pretty short hair back there.
At the time that I was wearing this I had just gotten a haircut. Not many users are gonna have shorter hair
than what I have on the back, and so if that's not cutting it, I don't know what you're gonna do if you have long hair.
And so that's kinda concerning. And it also provides no detail to you
as to what kind of effect that diminished reading is having on your data.
Is it just not getting the resolution it wants, or sometimes when it tries to make a reading
it doesn't get it? I don't know. It doesn't tell you that. Maybe if I was more hardcore I woulda shaved
a little patch for this just to slot right into, but no one's doing that.
So should you buy this for 500 U.S. dollars? Well, maybe. But do your research.
There are a couple of competitors, but as I understand it, this is pretty good.
And compared to a sleep study, this is way cheaper than that.
But if it's just like a novelty thing, like you just wanna check it out,
maybe try to find a used one or borrow somebody else's, 'cause that novelty's gonna wear off in about a week.
Like, my wife was really interested and she wanted to try it, but again,
unless you have an issue it's probably not worth it. Unless you're one of those body-hacky people
who just wants to measure everything, you ketogenic weirdos,
peeing on little strips and everything. Maybe it's fun for that.
It's a great Christmas gift, you know? But 500 bucks is pretty damn steep.
I'm not saying it's not worth it, but you gotta be the right person.
Anyway, thanks for watching ShortCircuit today. Maybe I'll wear this the rest of the summer.
Maybe I'll start wearing it when I go outside. It's pretty sci-fi, people might think
I'm a time traveler, you know? If you liked this video, get subscribed.
And just watch all of them. Just watch 'em all. Just never leave us.