The WEIRDEST Thing We Unboxed So Far - Dreem 2
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2021-05-05
·
2,931 words · ~14 min read
0:00
- Unless we're talking about headphones, electronics are your head typically look pretty stupid.
0:04
But today, we're here to normalize sleep monitoring devices that you wear on your head.
0:10
It's a headband. It's called the Dreem 2.
0:13
Okay, there's probably two different kinds of people who are clicking on this video.
0:16
One type of person just wants to see me open up this weird thing and talk about
0:20
what I know about it. The other type of person wants to know a lot about the Dreem 2 device.
0:24
Maybe this person's a body hacker. Maybe this person has a sleep condition,
0:28
like when you flail your limbs around and wake yourself up,
0:31
or you have apnea or insomnia. That person might be a little disappointed
0:35
because I only used this for 10 nights,
0:38
and I don't have any of those conditions. So this is not gonna be a deep dive
0:42
about body hacking or biometrics, and I haven't used the Oura Ring or anything like that.
0:47
But I can tell you what this thing feels like to sleep in
0:50
and where and how the app is, and some stuff, so stick around because, you know, I'm a nice guy.
0:57
Here you go. Dreem 2. There's two boxes here.
1:02
One is the headband itself, and one is a charging dock.
1:05
Now, I don't know what happened here at the office, but I went home with only one box.
1:09
I didn't have the charger, but fortunately, as we're going to find out,
1:13
there is a USB charging cable in here. So let's talk more about those after we see the main unit.
1:19
This is the headband. Pretty cool. It's really fabric-ey.
1:25
It's light. I believe this is only 130 grams. A lotta people are gonna have a concern about this thing.
1:30
"What's it like to sleep in? What sleep positions can I comfortably be in?
1:33
Is this thing gonna fly off my head? Is it gonna fit my head?"
1:37
I can help you with these questions, 'cause I have a head and my head's been in here.
1:41
I found wearing this at night was really no problem.
1:45
I found that I could sleep in any position without really any effect.
1:50
You know what? Nah, I'm not gonna put it on yet. Let's (laughs) do a tour of it first.
1:54
It has electrodes that measure EEG, your brain waves.
1:59
They're here on the forehead, so you have to make sure it's flush to your forehead.
2:03
I recommend washing your face before bed so this doesn't turn into some kinda gross,
2:07
stinky, pimple-inducing helmet. And then there's these polymer electrodes.
2:11
They're plastic and flexible. They're on the back. More on those in a bit.
2:15
There's also this little adjustment area right here.
2:18
I guess these are velcro, so you can put them
2:22
at various points on this band. I didn't have to adjust that much at all,
2:26
because on top of being able to move those little velcro bits around you can also stretch it.
2:31
And inside the box... Oh god. There's adapters for the charger.
2:37
This is the wall wart. The American one goes in here.
2:41
Inside there box there was also extra adjustment things.
2:46
So I believe you can go from 520-millimeter head circumference to 610,
2:52
whatever that means. I just left this one on here, but you can see that you can extend
2:57
how wide the adjustment band is using these extra...
3:01
This is the one for girthy melons. This is the one for little, tiny alien heads.
3:07
Nice to have, but I don't know how many people are gonna need those.
3:11
Is this? Oh, this comes off.
3:15
Oh, that's pretty cool. I guess you could wash this. You know, so it doesn't get too gummied up.
3:20
Oh, you can do that with this as well. Okay, that's cool. So that's hygienic, I like that.
3:26
And then, in this little box, is just the USB Micro B charger.
3:30
Oh my god. I'm all thumbs today! I had a problem with charging.
3:34
This thing doesn't really have enough charges for two nights, which actually is kind of okay.
3:39
It has enough charges for one night, and if you had this device for a long time,
3:44
you would assume that battery capacity is gonna shrink over time, so it's kinda like
3:49
they just gave you way more than you need at the beginning, so that if you have it for years you'll still
3:54
have a night's worth of battery over a long time,
3:57
because you're gonna be charging this to 100%. You're probably gonna plug it in in the morning
4:01
and leave it charging all day, so the battery's often gonna be at 100%,
4:05
which isn't very good for lithium-ion batteries. Now, the issue that I have, though,
4:08
is that if you get to bed and you haven't charged it
4:12
and you only have about 40% left, or at 35%,
4:15
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.
4:19
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.
4:27
If it was USB-C, you know, like my phone... My Pixel 4 charges like 50% in 15 minutes.
4:33
Now, this is where I have to have a little disclaimer, though, 'cause I was not using this charging thing,
4:38
which I haven't even opened yet. But I've seen it in the marketing, and it looks pretty stylish.
4:44
Okay, this thing has its own little plugin to the wall. It's a heavy, basically, like, paperweight.
4:49
And it doesn't have a USB port on it.
4:55
Oh! I was wondering what these little silver nubs were.
4:58
I guess that's pretty cool. And you can see, the headband is so light
5:02
that it can be on there in this avant garde kind of physics-defying posture.
5:07
Maybe that charges faster than USB-C. I don't know. And also, you can just put this on your nightstand
5:11
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.
5:15
Okay, back to what it looks like. The design's weird, right?
5:19
Because most of this is just headband. There are sensors in here, yes, and sensors here,
5:23
but all the battery and the onboard computer are all in this heavy part,
5:27
and that heavy part goes on the top of your head. And since that's the thickest and heaviest part,
5:31
it's great for it to be resting right here where you're never gonna be laying on it,
5:36
unless you sleep like one of those babies who flattens their head against the ground
5:40
and puts their butt in the air. But I grew outta that, and I usually just sleep on my back or side,
5:45
and in those postures... You know what? Let's put it on. In those postures, that's unaffected.
5:50
You know? Oh, I'm just gonna... I'll just be here.
5:53
Or here. Or here. And this is flat enough that it doesn't really matter.
5:59
Another nice thing that I did try was using on-ear or over-ear headphones with this.
6:04
Your headphone headband can easily go over and,
6:07
pretty much, these are so low-profile that having earphones go on there totally works.
6:13
This thing does not have any EMF while you're using it.
6:17
I mean, I'm not the kinda person that thinks I'm getting coronavirus from 5G,
6:21
but if you are, you'll be happy to know that the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals
6:25
are completely disabled while this thing is in use. Each night, pair it to your phone via Bluetooth,
6:32
and then you set up that, "I'm going to sleep right now,"
6:35
you put it on, it severs those connections, and then the rest of the data collection
6:40
and analysis of the data, that happens in real time, happens locally onboard with this little computer.
6:46
Pretty cool. But the downside of that is that every time
6:49
you want to start a night or finish the night
6:53
you have to kind of re-pair it to your phone, and it's not as seamless as your Bluetooth headphones
6:58
where as soon as they come out of the case your phone's like, ba-dink, "I recognize you,"
7:02
and just connects. Instead, you have to open the app, go to a new thing.
7:07
Let's say it's a nap, which I've never done. I only used it for sleep.
7:10
And then, you see this little exclamation mark? You gotta go, I'm gonna pair it.
7:15
Says, "Press the button on the headphone to pair." Okay, it's flashing. The app still hasn't responded.
7:22
"Your headband is currently being paired. Your headband is initializing. Successfully paired."
7:27
So it takes like 45 seconds every time,
7:30
which is kind of annoying. Then you get up in the morning and you wanna see the results,
7:34
'cause that's like the most fun part of this thing, and you have to kinda do that again.
7:38
A cool thing about Dreem is that when you wake up it gives you these cool cards
7:43
about how your sleep was the night before. And you get this right away.
7:48
There's a lotta features of the app that you only get after your first week,
7:52
so they can kinda collate how you sleep week-to-week
7:55
and your tendencies overall on average, but right away, you do get this cool feature,
8:01
you get a card for each night. So let's look at Monday, June 22nd,
8:04
the last time I used this puppy. Apparently I slept for seven hours.
8:08
I got an efficiency of 94%. I don't really know what that means.
8:12
It took me 16 minutes to fall asleep. I woke up only once, for two minutes.
8:17
And the adherence to my sleep schedule was a three out of five.
8:21
You know, it's hard. I try to go to bed at 10. Right now it's summertime. The sun is still out.
8:26
And hey, you know what? While I'm spilling my guts, my wife wants to watch "Dark" on Netflix every night.
8:31
It's an hour-long show. It's really easy for me to stay up past my bedtime.
8:35
I'm sorry, Dreem. Okay, but here's the cooler stuff.
8:39
There's sensors on here for measuring your heart rate.
8:43
And also your blood saturation level, although I don't think they've implemented that
8:46
on the software level yet. They have the sensors for it, but that's still a feature that's coming.
8:51
And that will let you know whether you woke up due to respiratory issues.
8:54
My average breathing was 17 CPM. What is C...
8:58
C's. C's per minute? I don't know what that is.
9:02
49 movements. Seven-hour duration. I did some deep sleeping. Some light sleep.
9:07
Some REM, that's the light blue. And then you can just check it out, how you went all night.
9:12
You can see all these little wake-up moments, and that's 'cause I have a baby sleeping in my room,
9:16
and she's a butthole sometimes and wants to eat
9:20
in the middle of the night like a god damn bodybuilder. And you can see, as I scroll along,
9:23
the little dude here is changing position. I often fall asleep on my left side.
9:29
That's something the app told me. I didn't even know that. That's good to know.
9:32
Now, if this was all you got from the app, being able to check out how your sleep last night went,
9:37
this would totally not be worth the 500 U.S. dollars that it costs.
9:42
500 U.S. dollars. This is the equivalent of something like 23andMe,
9:46
where you get it and it's cool for like a day,
9:50
and then who cares? You never really open it up again. 23andMe is not $500.
9:54
It's like $150 or something like that. But that's not all this thing can do.
9:58
It also has an integrated alarm clock,
10:01
which I actually thought was pretty cool. So what you can do is say, "I wanna wake up at 6:00 a.m.,
10:06
because I'm a masochist." You can actually set a window of five to 50 minutes
10:10
where the headband is gonna sense, based on your brainwaves, when you're most readily wake-up-able,
10:14
so that you can wake up not feeling groggy, but kinda ready to go, you know?
10:18
And you're just kinda, "Aw, yeah!" Sit up in bed like a mummy, "Ha!"
10:21
Ready to go. You can do that. The issue that I have with that, though,
10:25
is that this uses bone conduction audio,
10:29
little vibrations in the headband you can hear sound through,
10:32
instead of having like an earpiece. And so when it speaks to you, saying like,
10:37
"Night started," or like, "Battery charged," that's all through bone conduction,
10:42
and so is the alarm clock. And the alarm clock noise that I chose
10:46
was some kind of shaker sound, like shick-shick-shick-shick,
10:49
but it's pretty quiet and I felt like
10:52
I slept through it a lot. And one time, even, my wife was like,
10:56
"Uh, hey. Your thing's going off."
11:00
So I guess she could hear it but I couldn't. The main claim to fame for this thing
11:03
for making your sleep better is that it'll sense when you're in kind of a light sleep
11:08
and then play pink noise to make you go into a deeper sleep,
11:12
so it can actually improve your sleep. I didn't really see that.
11:16
I was pretty consistent throughout. And then there was one night that I had that turned on,
11:21
where it seemed to just do the pink noise like all night.
11:24
But again, it's quiet enough that it wasn't too disruptive.
11:27
Another feature that they have is onset experiences to help you fall asleep.
11:32
There's like a meditation thing, or breathing or calming noises,
11:36
and I think you can even do them all in succession. I didn't use any of those because
11:40
I fall asleep pretty easily, but I have read about people who really struggle to fall asleep, and over time,
11:46
got the amount of time it takes them to fall asleep from two hours down to like 20 minutes
11:50
consistently over a six-month period, and that is life-changing.
11:53
Another concern I have with this thing is that I got a flag in the app
11:58
that said that it wasn't collecting data as efficiently as possible,
12:02
and I think that has to do with these little polymer electrodes not connecting with my scalp
12:07
as clearly as they could. But the thing is, I have pretty short hair back there.
12:11
At the time that I was wearing this I had just gotten a haircut. Not many users are gonna have shorter hair
12:16
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.
12:21
And so that's kinda concerning. And it also provides no detail to you
12:26
as to what kind of effect that diminished reading is having on your data.
12:31
Is it just not getting the resolution it wants, or sometimes when it tries to make a reading
12:35
it doesn't get it? I don't know. It doesn't tell you that. Maybe if I was more hardcore I woulda shaved
12:39
a little patch for this just to slot right into, but no one's doing that.
12:43
So should you buy this for 500 U.S. dollars? Well, maybe. But do your research.
12:49
There are a couple of competitors, but as I understand it, this is pretty good.
12:52
And compared to a sleep study, this is way cheaper than that.
12:56
But if it's just like a novelty thing, like you just wanna check it out,
13:00
maybe try to find a used one or borrow somebody else's, 'cause that novelty's gonna wear off in about a week.
13:06
Like, my wife was really interested and she wanted to try it, but again,
13:11
unless you have an issue it's probably not worth it. Unless you're one of those body-hacky people
13:15
who just wants to measure everything, you ketogenic weirdos,
13:19
peeing on little strips and everything. Maybe it's fun for that.
13:22
It's a great Christmas gift, you know? But 500 bucks is pretty damn steep.
13:26
I'm not saying it's not worth it, but you gotta be the right person.
13:29
Anyway, thanks for watching ShortCircuit today. Maybe I'll wear this the rest of the summer.
13:34
Maybe I'll start wearing it when I go outside. It's pretty sci-fi, people might think
13:37
I'm a time traveler, you know? If you liked this video, get subscribed.
13:41
And just watch all of them. Just watch 'em all. Just never leave us.