The biology behind what goes wrong. The sensing that reads it in real time.
The stimulation that corrects it. Grounded in peer-reviewed research and clinical studies.
BIOLOGY | Sympathetic & Parasympathetic
Your nervous system runs two modes simultaneously
Your body runs a maintenance schedule it can only execute when the sympathetic system stands down - growth hormone secretion, memory consolidation, cortisol reset.
These aren't abstract benefits of good sleep. They are specific biological jobs that require parasympathetic dominance to run. When the sympathetic system fires during sleep, it doesn't pause the queue - it resets it. Cortisol rises. Growth hormone output drops. It starts over.
This is why two people can sleep identical hours and wake in completely different states. Hours in bed is not the variable. Parasympathetic hold time is.
BIOLOGY | Sleep Science
Your nervous system doesn't switch into sleep. It shifts toward it - slowly, across the hours before bed, as sympathetic activity withdraws and parasympathetic tone rises. Most of the sleep industry has failed to address this.
BIOLOGY | Surges
A brief sympathetic spike during sleep. They happen 20–30 times a night. You never feel them. But your sleep does.
Restorative Sleep
Surges
No sleep tracker has ever shown you this. Even once you're asleep, your sympathetic nervous system can fire unexpectedly - brief, subcortical spikes called Autonomic Surges.
They fragment deep sleep and REM from the inside, spike cortisol and suppress the recovery your body came to sleep for. The result: 8 hours in bed. Wrecked in the morning.
Until DUSQ, no wearable could detect them - because detecting them requires reading the sympathetic nervous system directly, in real time.
SENSING | EDA & PPG
Every major wearable measures optical PPG - light bounced off your skin to estimate heart rate, HRV, and blood oxygen. These are downstream signals. Consequences of your nervous system activity, not the origin of it.
DUSQ measures Electrodermal Activity - the change in skin conductance driven directly by sympathetic nerve activation. EDA detects a surge before any heart rate or blood pressure effect appears. It reads the system at its source.
PPG - the same optical technology in every leading wearable - adds the cardiovascular layer. Where EDA reads the state of your sympathetic nervous system, PPG shows how your body is responding to it. Together they close the loop.
Together, EDA and PPG give DUSQ a complete picture of your autonomic nervous system - not just one side of it
SOLVING | Vestibular & Vagus Nerve Stimulation
The vestibular nerve projects from the inner ear directly into the brainstem structures that regulate autonomic tone. Rhythmic vestibular input drives a parasympathetic shift with measurable effects on sleep depth. FDA cleared - 95% of participants experienced improved sleep within four weeks.
Being rocked as a baby.
Rocking, car journeys, slow train rides all produce drowsiness via the same pathway. The effect is neurological, not psychological.
The brain's primary line to the parasympathetic system. A low-level electrical signal through the skin activates it, suppressing sympathetic dominance and initiating the autonomic shift sleep requires. Hundreds of peer-reviewed papers across neurology, psychiatry, and sleep medicine.
Cold water on the face.
The mammalian dive reflex is vagal a cold stimulus triggers immediate vagal activation, dropping heart rate within seconds.
Why behind the ear?
The Postauricular Region directly behind your ear is where three distinct nervous system pathways converge in close proximity. DUSQ uses all three.
EDA sensing – Real-time measurement of sympathetic nervous system activity. Signal quality is highest here, giving DUSQ the sensitivity to detect Autonomic Surges the moment they begin.
nVNS – Stimulation of the auricular branch of the vagus nerve, accessible just beneath the skin, supporting parasympathetic dominance and smoother sleep onset.
nVEnS – Vestibular stimulation at the mastoid process, targeting the arousal pathways that interrupt deep sleep.
A device thin enough to wear while you fall asleep without ever noticing it's there. The form factor is as important as the science: if a sleep device disturbs your sleep, it has failed at the only thing that matters.
SYNTHESIS
Everything from L1, L2, and L3 comes together in four parallel pathways. Each one combines sensing and solving - sometimes both - to support a different moment of the night.
DUSQ is worn starting around four hours before bed. The nervous system's wind-down - the gradual withdrawal of sympathetic activity that makes sleep possible - needs to begin here. By the time you close your eyes, that shift should already be well underway.
Through the evening, DUSQ tracks your autonomic balance via the EDA signal behind your ear: how quickly sympathetic activity is withdrawing, how fully parasympathetic tone is establishing itself. This builds a live picture of your biological readiness for sleep.
If readiness is tracking low, the system acts. Targeted vestibular and vagus nerve stimulation sessions are delivered through the evening to support the shift - deepening parasympathetic dominance before it becomes a problem at the pillow.
When the readiness window opens and you are ready to sleep, stimulation shifts focus. Vestibular and vagus nerve stimulation continues - the vagus nerve directly supporting smoother sleep onset, the vestibular pathway sustaining the parasympathetic state built through the evening.
Sleep onset is a threshold. The evening's preparation builds toward it. The stimulation at bedtime helps the nervous system cross it.
In lab studies measured against the PSG record, subjects using this protocol showed measurably shorter sleep onset latency. Not self-reported. Tracked to the epoch against the clinical reference standard.
Once asleep, the system switches to protection. DUSQ continues reading the EDA signal. A rapid rise in conductance signals an Autonomic Surge - a subcortical arousal event that fragments sleep architecture without waking you. The average adult experiences 20 to 30 of these every night.
When a surge is detected, a brief vestibular and vagus nerve stimulation response is delivered. The vestibular component targets the arousal pathways interrupting deep sleep; the vagal response suppresses the underlying sympathetic activation. The aim is attenuation - shortening the surge before it propagates.
When each one is attenuated rather than left to run, the recovery the night was supposed to deliver is actually delivered. You wake up restored. Not just rested - restored.
Sleep Lab - physical proof
A purpose-built sleep lab. Full polysomnographic instrumentation, multiple environments designed to replicate domestic sleep conditions and a resident research team. Everything Dusq claims has been measured here against the gold standard.
Workflow
How a night becomes data. Collection → processing → validation → publication. The rigor made visible.
The gold standard. EEG, EOG, EMG, ECG, respiratory effort, oxygen saturation. What every claim in this page is validated against.
Every leading wearable runs simultaneously with PSG in every study. DUSQ must beat all of them. Or the metric doesn't ship.
Ships August 2026
Almost full. Last few spots left.
