Local sleep deprivation to treat patients with depression

After four rounds of pharmacological treatment no remission is reached in approximately a third of depressed patients, demonstrating the need for novel therapeutic approaches. Local sleep deprivation is an experimental non-pharmacological treatment for depression based on the strong profound and rapid beneficial effect of total sleep deprivation on depressed subjects but without the side effects. Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) modulation, for local sleep deprivation, can be achieved via auditory stimulations during sleep using a wearable device.

To modulate sleep slow waves locally, a wearable sleep monitoring and stimulation device has been developed within the framework of the University Medicine Zurich flagship project "SleepLoop" at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology Zurich. The SleepLoop® device permits automatic detection of slow waves during sleep and their closed-loop acoustic stimulation, meaning local enhancement or attenuation by precisely playing the acoustic stimuli during the up- or down-phase of the slow waves. A key potential of this technology is that it enables the application of local SWS-D in a home setting over multiple nights.

The high configurability of the therapy (e.g., time, duration, intensity) represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the development of a personalized approach using feedback from digital phenotyping. With this project we would like to modify this technology to allow specific manipulation of brain activity and achieve a sleep deprivation like effect without any disruption of the structure or duration of sleep.