I wanted to test the influence of the Chilipad on sleep, which uses water to control temperature of a cooling mattress pad, motivated by the idea that insomnia research has shown that sleeping at temperatures between 60-68°F greatly improves your ability to fall and stay asleep (essentially impacting deep sleep according to Zeo website and other experiments). The two figures below show the influence of its use respectively on Deep and REM sleep
On the figures, the left bar (0) represents the average time spent without the chilipad, the right one (1) with, and #data on the top of the bars gives the number of nights that have been collected.
Throughout this time frame, I configured the chilipad for regulating the temperature of the mattress around 16 degrees C. The results tend to show that there is not significant impact of its use on REM sleep. One might notice a slight negative influence on deep sleep, around 5 mins less on average when the pad is used. This tendency might be also observed on REM Sleep.
The bottom line is that the impact of the Chilipad on sleep still needs to be demonstrated, notably during summer when the temperature of the bedroom is significantly higher. It might also be interesting to gather data with the mattress providing a slightly warmer temperature (e.g., at 18/19 degrees C ).
Fig.1: Use of the Chilipad and impact on deep sleep
Fig. 2: Use of the Chilipad and impact on REM sleep.
Fig. 3: Trends of time spent in deep sleep (red line) and in REM sleep (yellow line) when the Chilipad is used (white vertical bars on the right side).
Time Frame of the experiment
30 Sept. 2012 - 6 Apr. 2013