A company aiming to help alleviate post-traumatic stress disorder is hoping to roll out a therapeutic platform, developed by a son for his father, that promises to provide veterans a good night’s sleep.
NightWare, a medical device company, over the next two months, seeks approval from the Veteran Affairs and Defense departments for its “kits” that essentially arouse a sleeping soldier from a PTSD-induced nightmare.
“What it does is it interrupts the nightmare,” Matthew Tucker, the company’s chief commercial officer, told the Washington Examiner.
The stimulus comes from an Apple Watch that is strapped to the soldier’s arm, which monitors his or her vitals. It vibrates when it senses that the sleeper is experiencing a nightmare. The jiggling is enough to pull the person out of the nightmare, but not enough to wake them fully, Tucker said.
“It doesn’t arouse you fully to waking up, so you get more restful sleep,” he said.
The platform is the brainchild of Tyler Skluzacek, who wanted to help his father, Patrick.
Patrick spent over 20 years in the military and suffers from PTSD after serving in the U.S. Army as a convoy commander in Fallujah. He endured frequent nightmares upon returning stateside in 2007, as he couldn’t shake what he experienced in Iraq.
One of his frequent worries was getting bombed while driving down the road in Blaine, Minnesota, where he currently lives.
“You’re so paranoid from doing this [being in Iraq] for a whole year, you just can’t quit being there,” he told NPR.
Patrick lost his home, marriage, and job to PTSD and the nightmares.
The sleepless episodes also changed him for the worse, according to Tyler.
“My dad was essentially not sleeping well. Very irritable. A very irritable man; not like he was before he left,” he told NPR.
Fitful sleep for soldiers, active duty or retired, is widespread, with 52% of combat veterans with PTSD experiencing nightmares “fairly often,” according to the VA. Among the general public, about 5% of people suffer nightmares, the department states.
The high propensity of nightmares among the military is why NightWare seeks to sell its product to the VA and DOD.
“That is where the concentration of people in need are,” Tucker said.
To help military people like his father, Tyler participated in a computer hackathon in 2015 that was focused on developing applications to benefit people with PTSD. The event, which is where computer developers join forces for a couple days to build prototypes that address certain issues, was held in Washington, D.C.
Shortly after the platform was created, an investor purchased it and created NightWare. Tyler is an adviser to the company.
His platform has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration and has been subjected to clinical trials. The results have so far been promising from participants.
“They’re experiencing the clinical outcome we had hoped for, which means that their sleep quality has improved,” Tucker said, adding that the platform performed “better than a sham or placebo device.”
Patrick, who originally took vodka and pills to keep from waking up from the nightmares, has also benefited from the platform.
“It was night and day when I put that watch on and it started working,” he said.
Still, the nightmares are not fully gone, but they are less frequent.
“There are some bad nights out there, regardless with the watch or not. It’s hard for a little watch to break up a nightmare, but I rarely wake up at night,” he said.
The NightWare platform consists of the application, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch. It costs $7,500, and the devices can only be used for monitoring nightmares — not email or internet surfing.
“It’s completely dedicated and allocated just to deliver the treatment,” Tucker said, adding, “we know there are applications [at the app store] that could interfere with the software that NightWare has, making the therapy not be delivered correctly.”
The cost of the application would likely be absorbed by the federal agencies, not the end user, according to Tucker.
“They pay for it through their budgets,” he said.
