The DUSQ Sleep Lab

Why we built our own lab

The original plan was a series of external commissions. What it could not account for was pace.

External research introduces variables that cannot be controlled: different equipment, different environments, different subject populations, different timelines. Each study answers a single question in isolation. But the questions were compounding faster than any study could answer them. Every answer generated three more. The gap between what the product needed to know and what any individual study could tell us kept widening, and a product built on a claim as specific as ours could not afford that gap.

The claim is this: gentle, targeted nerve stimulation, delivered at the right moment before and during sleep, changes how the body recovers through the night. Testing whether that holds, across every iteration of the sensor and every refinement of the protocol, requires infrastructure. A permanent, embedded research environment that could answer questions as fast as they were being asked.

So we built the lab. Not as a credential to point to, but as a requirement for building the product at all.

The problem we had to solve first

The lab was built. Then came the first studies. And the data came back telling us something we hadn't fully accounted for.

Clinical sleep environments, the standard for sleep research, carry a specific limitation. The first night in an unfamiliar sleep environment, even under carefully controlled conditions, produces consistent changes in sleep architecture. REM is reduced. Sleep onset takes longer. Wakefulness increases. The autonomic nervous system responds to environmental novelty, and that response shows up directly in the data. Researchers call this the first-night effect, and it is well documented. The environment itself was shaping what we were measuring.

For a device designed to function in real environments, this created a real constraint. Data collected in a clinical setting tells you how a device performs in a clinical setting. DUSQ needed to know something different: how it performs in the conditions where people actually sleep.

Every design decision that followed, from room configuration to ambient environment calibration, was made to reduce the distance between what we measure here and what happens in the bedrooms where DUSQ is used.

What we had to build to get there

What does ground truth mean here?

Before anything else could be measured, the lab had to decide what measurement meant. For a device making specific claims about the nervous system during sleep, ground truth has to be equally specific.

Polysomnography, PSG, is the most complete picture of sleep that science has. It records the electrical activity of the brain through the night, allowing trained analysts to identify every stage of sleep as it happens. Alongside that, it captures eye movement, which marks REM sleep; muscle activity, which tracks transitions in and out of it; heart rhythm; breathing effort and airflow; and blood oxygen levels. Every channel runs simultaneously, through every hour of the night.

The methodology has been refined across half a century of sleep research and is recognised as the international reference standard by sleep medicine bodies worldwide. Every other sleep measurement tool, consumer or clinical, is ultimately calibrated against what PSG records. It is the instrument that tells you what actually happened during a night of sleep, not a proxy for it.

Alongside PSG, the lab runs clinical-grade electrodermal activity equipment, the same sensing modality DUSQ uses, measured via research instruments rather than a wearable sensor. This establishes what the EDA signal looks like at the moment of a genuine autonomic event, against which the wearable sensor's output can be precisely compared.

Every claim DUSQ makes was true in this room first.

Our users already had a reference point.

The people who use DUSQ already own sleep-tracking devices. When DUSQ works, they will see the results in those devices before they see any data from us. Understanding exactly what they would see became part of every study.

Every leading consumer and research-grade wearable runs alongside PSG in every study: same subjects, same night, same environment. Every study generates two records: what PSG captures as ground truth, and what each consumer wearable reports. When DUSQ is active, we track what changes across both. Where do readings shift? In which metrics, and by how much? The consumer panel tells us not just that DUSQ works, but where that effect is visible to the person wearing it.

Designed around the bedroom, not the lab.

The lab runs two parallel environments: the clinical standard where the full PSG ground truth is established, and sleep rooms furnished to replicate domestic conditions. No visible clinical instrumentation. Mattresses, cushions, temperature, lighting, and ambient sound are all configurable to match each subject's familiar sleep environment.

The DUSQ charging case sits on the bedside table in these rooms, monitoring ambient sound, light, and temperature through each night. The same environmental signals the product tracks at home are tracked here, allowing body-level autonomic data to be correlated with the room conditions that may be driving it.

One of these rooms accommodates four subjects at the same time, a scientific design choice as much as a logistical one. When four people sleep under identical conditions on the same night, the environment stops being a variable. Any differences in how their nervous systems behave can only come from their physiology. It is one of the cleaner ways to separate what is universal in sleep biology from what is individual, without needing separate studies across different nights.

How the research actually runs

The research team monitors active studies from a separate analysis room with direct sightlines into every sleep environment. Signal quality, artefact detection, epoch annotation: all of it happens without entering the sleep rooms. No disturbance. No interruption. The record stays clean through the night.

Each study is built to answer four questions, each building on the one before it.

Did the sensor fire at the right moment? Every autonomic event that DUSQ's EDA sensor detects is time-stamped against the simultaneous PSG and clinical EDA record. We can see exactly what was happening in the brain and autonomic signal at the moment each detection fired: whether the event was real, what its profile looked like, and whether the wearable sensor captured it with the same precision as the clinical instrument.

Did the stimulation actually do anything? When DUSQ delivers a stimulation response, that event is logged with a precise timestamp. After each night, the corresponding section of the PSG recording is analysed for evidence of attenuation: whether the surge shortened, whether the autonomic signal returned to baseline faster than comparable events without stimulation, and whether sleep architecture remained intact in the period that followed. The complete overnight record determines whether the intervention worked, and whether it worked without cost.

Did the pre-sleep protocol change what happened? The lab also studies the pre-sleep period. How does the autonomic signal shift during the transition from wakefulness to sleep? What patterns predict a faster onset? And does DUSQ's pre-sleep stimulation measurably change that trajectory? This is the research behind the bedtime readiness signal.

What does the person wearing DUSQ actually see? With every leading wearable running simultaneously, each study captures what happens to consumer-detectable signals when DUSQ is active: HRV recovery rates, sleep scores, stage durations across the night. This tells us not just that DUSQ works by the PSG record, but what the person wearing it is likely to see in the apps they already use.

The standard this lab holds itself to