Night Terror Tracking and Coping

Scope and Starting Off

This project was all about trying to help adults with a parasomnia called Night Terrors that is rare in adults and therefore has little research done to help them, but also can greatly effect their sleep and other parts of their life.

Night terrors are a parasomnia that cause a person to be woken up in the middle of the night, often screaming, thrashing, or even running away from an unseen terror. The person effected feels an overwhelming sense of terror and even life-or-death threat in their sleep, and consequently has a spike in heart rate and gets a shot of adrenaline. The person remains unconscious for most of the episode, and after snapping out of it can either well asleep relatively easily or be shaken up for the rest of the night. Often, the person will not remember the episode at all, and they are very rarely able to remember what they dreamt/hallucinated (the “terror”) that scared them in the first place.
This is a parasomnia I myself have experienced, and having an inside look onto how it worked, and how it can effect everyday life I began to look into how technology could be used to help myself and others who suffer from it.

Constraints

There were quite a few constraints I had with this project, both for the design and what I was able to research. Scientific research on night terrors is nearly always focused on children, and as with a lot of sleep science a lot of it is still not understood. Not only was secondary research squandered by this, but primary research was throttled as well. The only person I know of you has suffered night terrors is Billie Eilish, and she is not easy to contact.

Research and Take-Aways

Despite the difficulty I was able to do some research, and get some main takeaways that influenced the main design and purpose of the design I wanted to create. Here are the main ones:

• People usually do not remember night terrors, so you cannot dissect them for an underlying meaning
  • This also means they can’t always mark down they had one, so the app needs to detect night terrors for them
• Finding cause and prevention is not very possible. The route cause can be so different for very person and should be handled by a professional, and all known methods of prevention stand on shaky ground (and seem rather disturbing to sleep themselves).
• Self Esteem is a high priority. A lot of adults with night terrors have no real support system, with it being so rare and with so little research behind them. I want to make the user feel not alone in their struggles, as it can be so easy to feel in these situations.
• There are “Ticks” that can cause a night terror. This came from my own experience as well as secondary research, and could be very useful in prediction to create a sort of targeted prevention that is less disturbing to regular sleep.

Ideation & Design

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Stay Tuned!

This project is still in process.