Workplace Brain Health
This project aims to develop a brain health data repository to help employers and employees better understand how sleep and meditation impact cognitive function.
Project Overview
Updated March 31, 2023
The Problem
It is broadly accepted that sleep is essential to our overall health and well-being.
But to what degree do sleep and other positive lifestyle factors such as meditation contribute to our overall brain health and help us operate at our best?
How We Are Solving It
Interaxon, with its leading consumer EEG platform, is spearheading the Workplace Brain Health Platform team in collaboration with Cambridge Brain Sciences, Hatch and Western University. This team aims to develop a brain health data repository to help employers and employees better understand how sleep as well as activities such as meditation can impact cognitive function (learning, thinking, reasoning, remembering, problem solving and decision making). In turn, the team seeks to determine the impact of cognitive performance on the overall health and safety of Canadian workers, especially in natural resources, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing and construction.
The vision is to develop a substantial repository of aggregated and anonymized data related to sleep and meditation. This large consolidation of data and data-driven insights will be leveraged toward a variety of machine learning applications to improve the well-being of Canadians and create new health and wellness products that support the enhancement of cognitive performance.
The first phase of the Workplace Brain Health Platform project includes a pilot study wherein employees who participate in the project will benefit from an engaging user experience that integrates biometrics (measurements of brain, heart and other physiological data) and individual survey data toward the vision of producing a highly personalized wellness solution, which will include tools such as a meditation app and the Muse S sleep band, in addition to cognitive and behavioural assessments offered by Cambridge Brain Sciences.
The Result
This project developed a brain health platform using cognitive quantification tools and brain sensing technologies to gather and analyze anonymous brain-health data for the creation of a personalized wellness strategy that helps employees to lead happier and healthier lives. Meditation program participants significantly exceeded expected usage rates throughout and after the program and sleep program participants logged over 17,000 hours of sleep data and over 900 hours of EEG data. Participants who completed the initial project study reported improvements in stress, mood, self-regulation and notably, in sleep quality and sleep onset latency and initial assessments identified a 20% increase in sleep quality as recorded by the gold-standard Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index.
