RESTORE aims to enhance a warfighter’s ability to achieve the restorative effects of sleep through innovative restoration technologies and personalized regimens.

July 28th, 2021—Woburn, MA— Aptima, Inc. announced today that it has received a contract valued at up to $1.29 million from the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), to develop RESTORE: Restorative & Efficient Sleep Technologies for Optimizing Operator Resiliency and Effectiveness, a holistic sleep optimization and remediation platform.

About one-third of a human being’s life is spent sleeping, the need for sleep is an undeniable biological imperative, however, methods for reducing amounts of sleep without long-term negative effects remain elusive.

Sleep issues are prevalent across all the Services, including USSOCOM

Adults need at least six, ideally seven to nine, hours of sleep within a 24-hour period to perform at peak efficiency. Military operations, particularly in the Special Operations Forces (SOF) domain, are unpredictable and do not lend themselves to a tidy 24-hour period. Furthermore, sleep issues can persist after returning home from overseas combat or training deployments, for both SOF and non-SOF personnel.

Aptima and partners at West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, Oura Health Ltd., and Fusion Sport, will develop a holistic sleep optimization and remediation platform that will provide restorative sleep solutions throughout an operator’s entire deployment cycle, through training, recovery, and deployment. RESTORE leverages existing technologies that can optimize or remedy sleep in controlled settings, narrowed down to the three most

Data sources utilized in RESTORE’s personalized sleep recommendation system

effective and practical technologies: the enhancement of slow-wave sleep activity via auditory stimulation, photobiomodulation (PBMT) therapy, and floatation therapy. The platform packages these technologies so that they can be used when they are needed most. RESTORE employs a cyclical sense-assess-augment taxonomy for optimizing human effectiveness. The first sense component of the RESTORE platform is a measurement strategy that collects data on current sleep patterns, including objective measurement techniques such as polysomnography (PSG) for laboratory studies, wearable commercial sleep monitors for applied applications, and subjective measures such as sleep scales and other smartwatch-based survey methods.

The platform intelligently and securely fuses human state assessment data with  enviornmental factors to get a complete picture of the user’s sleep and subsequently deliver tailored sleep recommendations via personalized sleep regimens and cutting-edge, empirically validated technological interventions.

Despite RESTORE being developed to address military needs, Aptima’s Business Development team sees a great deal of potential for RESTORE to address the needs of a wide array of consumers in commercial markets who are prone to sleep disruptions such as collegiate/professional athletics, business travelers, on-call physicians, parents of newborns, etc.…

This article reflects work performed on a SBIR Phase II project entitled, “RESTORE II: Restorative & Efficient Sleep Technologies for Optimizing Operator Resiliency and Effectiveness”, sponsored by the USSOCOM, Special Operations Forces Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Science and Technology Directorate, whom the authors wish to thank.

For more information about RESTORE, please contact aptima_info@aptima.com.