Sleep is as essential as food, water, and air
In the quiet hours that constitute a third of human life, a Swiss company called Sleepiz is attempting to close a long-standing gap between what medicine knows about sleep and what it actually measures. Using low-power radar and machine learning, co-founder Max Sieghold has built a system that monitors breathing, heartbeat, and movement through the night without touching the patient — bringing the diagnostic laboratory home, where sleep can finally be studied as it truly occurs. The ambition is not merely technological: it is a reckoning with how profoundly sleep shapes cognition, cardiovascular health, and neurological fate, and how poorly modern healthcare has honored that truth.
- Millions of people with sleep apnea and COPD go undiagnosed or poorly managed because the current gold standard — a single night wired up in an artificial lab environment — is both disruptive and incomplete.
- Untreated sleep disorders carry a cascading human cost: elevated accident risk, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, depression, and the accelerated accumulation of the same brain proteins linked to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
- Sleepiz's contactless radar system detects breathing patterns, pulse rate, and body movement with no wearables or cables, removing compliance barriers entirely and allowing monitoring across many nights to capture a condition's true variability.
- For COPD patients, the technology acts as an early-warning system — sleep is often the first place where deteriorating vital signs appear, and catching an exacerbation early can prevent hospitalization and reduce systemic healthcare costs.
- The company is live in the EU and India and is pushing toward global expansion, with a broader cultural goal: elevating sleep health to the same public consciousness as diet and exercise.
Max Sieghold co-founded Sleepiz around a deceptively simple frustration: the way medicine diagnoses sleep disorders is fundamentally at odds with the nature of sleep itself. Patients arrive at sleep laboratories, get fitted with dozens of cables, and are watched through cameras — conditions that make natural sleep nearly impossible. A single monitored night captures only a fragment of what is often a chronic, variable condition. Sleepiz's answer is radar: low-power electromagnetic waves that detect the micro-movements of breathing, the rhythm of a heartbeat, and the shifting of a body through the night, entirely without contact.
The stakes of this problem run deeper than convenience. Sleep occupies a third of human life and performs functions the waking body cannot replicate — neurological reorganization, cellular repair, and a cerebrospinal flush that clears toxic proteins like beta-amyloid and tau, the same proteins implicated in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Even a single night of deprivation accelerates their accumulation. The cardiovascular system depends on the pressure drop of deep sleep; chronic disruption raises the risk of hypertension, heart attack, and stroke. Sleep disorders have also been linked to insulin resistance, depression, and anxiety.
Sleep apnea alone carries an estimated annual mental health cost of $3,200 to $4,000 per unmanaged patient, according to research from Harvard and McKinsey — yet the diagnostic pipeline is clogged with long waits, and the primary treatment, CPAP therapy, suffers from notoriously poor patient compliance. Sleepiz addresses both problems: because the system requires nothing from the patient — no device to charge, no sensor to wear — monitoring can continue indefinitely across natural nights at home, capturing the full picture of a condition.
The same platform applies to COPD, which affects 250 million people globally. COPD patients experience sudden exacerbations several times a year, and if undetected, these episodes can escalate into hospitalization. Because vital sign changes often appear first during sleep, continuous home monitoring creates an early-warning window that clinical visits cannot provide.
Sieghold's vision reaches beyond the device itself. He wants sleep health to occupy the same cultural space as nutrition and exercise — something people understand, monitor, and take seriously. Sleepiz is currently available in the EU and India, with global expansion underway and plans to extend its role from screening into therapy and long-term disease management. The underlying bet is that when sleep disorders become as easy to detect as they deserve to be, their toll on individuals and healthcare systems will finally begin to diminish.
Max Sieghold sits in the offices of Sleepiz, a company he co-founded to solve a problem that has haunted medicine for decades: how to diagnose sleep disorders accurately, cheaply, and without turning patients into laboratory specimens. The company's answer is radar—specifically, low-power electromagnetic waves that can detect the subtle movements of breathing, the rhythm of a heartbeat, and the shifting of a body through the night, all without a single electrode, cable, or wearable device touching the skin.
The inspiration came from a simple observation about how medicine currently works. Sleep laboratories, the gold standard for diagnosis, are anything but natural. A patient arrives in an unfamiliar room, gets fitted with thirty cables, and knows they're being watched by camera and audio. Under those conditions, sleep itself becomes impossible to study accurately. Worse, a single night of monitoring—the typical protocol—captures only a snapshot of what might be a chronic, variable condition. Sieghold and his team recognized that the gap between what modern data science could do and what the medical establishment actually did was enormous. They decided to close it.
The stakes of getting this right are substantial. One-third of human life is spent asleep, yet sleep remains poorly understood and rarely measured in any systematic way. The body uses sleep to restore itself cognitively and physically. During sleep, the brain reorganizes the day's inputs, generates new cells, and triggers a self-cleaning mechanism—cerebrospinal fluid washes away toxins that accumulate during waking hours. Without this nightly purge, harmful proteins like beta-amyloid and tau begin to deposit in brain tissue, the same proteins that drive Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Even a single night of sleep deprivation accelerates this accumulation. The heart, too, depends on sleep. During non-rapid eye movement sleep, heart rate slows and blood pressure drops, allowing the cardiovascular system to recover. Chronic sleep loss raises the risk of hypertension, heart attack, and stroke. The mind suffers as well—insufficient sleep breeds irritability, reduced stress tolerance, and increased risk of depression and anxiety. Sleep disorders have also been linked to diabetes through effects on insulin resistance and glucose tolerance, and to neurodegenerative disease through the failure to clear toxic proteins.
Sleep apnea, in particular, carries immediate and long-term dangers. When untreated, it increases the risk of workplace and traffic accidents, drains quality of life through daytime fatigue, and creates a causal chain leading to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and mental health problems. A study from Harvard Medical School and McKinsey estimated the annual mental health cost of unmanaged moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea at between $3,200 and $4,000 per patient. Yet the current system for diagnosing and treating it is broken. There is widespread lack of awareness among both the general public and physicians. The diagnostic methods are cumbersome, creating bottlenecks and long waiting times. And the primary therapy—continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP—has notoriously poor compliance rates, meaning many patients who are diagnosed simply stop using their machines.
Sleepiz's technology works by using radar to detect micro and macro movements during sleep. The system captures breathing patterns, breathing rate, pulse rate, and overall body movement, then applies machine learning algorithms to identify sleep apnea, sleep phases, and movement disorders. It can also track trends in these parameters over time, revealing patterns that a single night would miss. The advantages are threefold: the patient wears nothing, so sleep remains truly natural; monitoring can continue indefinitely, capturing the full variability of a condition; and there is zero compliance burden—no charging, no remembering to wear anything. This accessibility matters. Anyone, anywhere, can be monitored.
The same technology applies to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which affects 250 million people worldwide according to the World Health Organization. COPD patients experience exacerbations—sudden worsening episodes—several times a year depending on disease progression. If undetected, these exacerbations can lead to severe outcomes and hospitalization. Sleep acts as a seismograph of overall health. Changes in baseline vital signs often appear earliest during sleep, making it the ideal window for early detection. Catching an exacerbation early enables timely intervention, reducing both morbidity and the cost burden on healthcare systems.
Sieghold's vision extends beyond technology. He sees a future where sleep health receives the same cultural attention as nutrition and exercise. That requires education—teaching people that quality sleep means eight hours of regular, undisturbed, non-disordered sleep, and that basic sleep hygiene matters. It requires raising awareness of symptoms and available treatments. And it requires making screening accessible. Sleepiz is currently available in the European Union and India, with plans to expand globally and to build integrated services that accompany patients not just through screening and diagnosis but through therapy and disease management. The company is betting that when sleep disorders become as easy to detect as they should be, the burden they place on individuals and society will finally begin to lift.
Citas Notables
When we sleep in a sleep laboratory, we are in a new environment, often have more than thirty cables on our body, and are being surveilled by camera and audio. Surely, we do not sleep normally in such an environment.— Max Sieghold, Co-Founder and CFO of Sleepiz
Sleep acts as a seismograph of the patient's overall health, and changes in baseline vital signs can often be detected earliest during sleep.— Max Sieghold, on COPD monitoring
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why does a sleep lab fail so badly at capturing what actually happens when someone sleeps?
The environment itself is the problem. You're in a strange room with thirty cables attached to your body, cameras watching, audio recording. That's not sleep—that's performance anxiety. And you only get one night, which tells you almost nothing about a chronic condition that varies night to night.
So home monitoring is just more comfortable, or does it actually change the diagnosis?
It changes everything. You see the real variability. Some nights are worse than others. Some nights the apnea is mild, some nights it's severe. One night in a lab misses all of that. You need at least three nights at home to see the actual pattern.
The radar technology—how does it know the difference between someone breathing normally and someone having an apnea event?
It detects the micro-movements of the chest and abdomen, the rhythm of breathing, the pulse. Machine learning algorithms are trained on thousands of nights of data to recognize what normal looks like versus what an apnea event looks like. The system learns the patterns.
And the patient doesn't have to do anything? Just sleep?
Exactly. No wearables, no charging, no remembering. You go to bed as you normally would. The radar sits on the nightstand or mounted on the wall. It's completely passive from the patient's perspective.
Why does early detection of COPD exacerbations during sleep matter so much?
Because sleep is when the body's stress is most visible. If your lungs are starting to fail, the signs show up first during sleep when you're not consciously compensating. Catch it early, treat it early, and you avoid hospitalization. You also save the healthcare system enormous costs.
What's the biggest barrier to this technology actually helping people?
Awareness. Doctors don't think about sleep. Patients don't know they have a problem. And even when they're diagnosed, they don't comply with treatment. We're trying to make diagnosis so easy and non-invasive that it becomes routine. That's how you change the system.