EZwakeup: a sleep environment design for sleep quality improvement.

Sleep quality affects people's work performance, mood, safety, and quality of life. Poor sleep quality reduces short-term memory, cognitive abilities, and motor skills for all age groups. We introduce EZwakeup, a system that extracts sleep quality indicators with an eTextile-based sensing system and applies feedback-guided external stimuli to smoothly wake people up from deep sleep. It does not require people to wear any external devices and can be directly deployed unobtrusively in home environment. In experiments, participants reported that they felt well rested and energetic for the rest of the day when they were awakened by the guided stimuli. This result suggests that EZwakeup might be a viable option for improving personal sleep quality and have potential in treating common sleep disorders.