US Government Launches Program to Revolutionize Home Sleep Diagnosis and Treatment

## New Funding Opportunity for Closed-Loop Sleep Technologies The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has launched the Restorative & health-Enhancing Sleep Time (REST) program, a research funding opportunity aimed at developing closed-loop, in-home sleep technologies. The program, introduced by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), seeks to create the first closed-loop systems that can objectively measure health-relevant features of sleep and adaptively correct poor sleep in real time. According to Alicia Jackson, PhD, director at ARPA-H, poor sleep is a significant contributor to chronic diseases such as dementia, depression, diabetes, and heart disease. The REST program aims to address this issue by developing technologies that can measure and improve sleep quality at home. Jackson notes that current tools for measuring sleep often fall short in the home, lacking the ability to track health-relevant brain activity features of sleep or provide personalized treatment during sleep. ## Measuring and Treating Sleep as a Controllable Biological System The REST program will pursue two technical areas: Measure & Diagnose and Control & Treat. The Measure & Diagnose area seeks proposals to develop validated, in-home systems that capture sleep-relevant physiology and diagnose insomnia and other forms of poor sleep with clinical fidelity. The Control & Treat area seeks proposals to develop noninvasive, closed-loop systems that adapt interventions to the user's real-time physiology throughout the night. The program aims to lift insomnia treatment response rates from roughly 50% to at least 90% and remission rates from 30% to at least 80%. This would provide insights into sleep by treating it as a controllable biological system that can be measured and improved through modulation at home. The program will also be supported by a separate element focused on sleep-health modeling, data harmonization, benchmarking, cross-performer integration, and independent verification and validation. ## Collaboration and Teamwork Nate Mohatt, PhD, program manager for REST, notes that the program is designed around a simple but ambitious premise: we can more accurately measure sleep quality at home and correct it in real time. Mohatt emphasizes that teaming will be necessary to achieve the program's goals, and prospective proposers are encouraged to form teams representing varied expertise from private and public entities to submit a research proposal.