Apollo Neuroscience Announces Publication of Landmark Clinical Study Demonstrating Apollo Wearable Use Yields an Average of 46 More Minutes of Sleep Per Night

Clinical study of 475,000 nights of sleep data across 935 people over 3 years found Apollo use was associated with an average of 46 additional minutes of sleep per night and a 77% reduction in odds of sleeping less than 6 hours in one night of use.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Apollo Neuroscience™, the pioneering developer of wearable technology designed to improve sleep, stress resilience, and HRV, today announced the publication of a new peer-reviewed clinical study in JMIR mHealth and uHealth examining the relationship between use of the Apollo Wearable and improvements in sleep duration, as recorded using Oura Ring.

The study, titled "Association Between Duration of Transcutaneous Vibratory Stimulation Delivered by the Apollo Neuro Device and Extension of Total Sleep Time," analyzed retrospective real-world sleep and wearable data from 935 Apollo and Oura Ring users across 474,852 nights of observation between 2019 and 2022.

Researchers found that nighttime use of Apollo's patented vibration technology was significantly associated with increased total sleep time in a dose-dependent manner, especially among chronic short sleepers getting 6 hours of sleep or less per night.

Among participants with baseline sleep durations under 6 hours, use of Apollo for at least 3 hours overnight was associated with:

• An average increase of approximately 46 additional minutes of sleep per night
• A 77% reduction in the likelihood of experiencing short sleep (<6 hours)
• Increased REM sleep with preservation of deep sleep

"This is one of the largest real-world interventional sleep studies ever conducted examining how wearable technology can improve sleep," said Dr. David M. L. Rabin, MD, PhD, neuroscientist, board-certified psychiatrist, and Chief Medical Officer of Apollo Neuroscience. "For hundreds of millions of people struggling with chronic sleep issues, these findings suggest that using the Apollo wearable can meaningfully support healthier sleep as much as leading prescription sleep  medications, without side effects, or active effort."

Chronic short sleep affects an estimated 70 million adults in the United States and has been linked to increased risks of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, cognitive impairment, mood disorders, and dementia. Current pharmacological interventions often produce modest benefits while carrying risks of side effects, dependency, or next-day impairment.

"This study marks an important milestone in sleep medicine," said co-author and double-board certified sleep clinician Dr. Michael Breus, PhD. "Across nearly half a million nights of real-world data, Apollo was associated with clinically meaningful improvements in sleep duration without medication or intensive behavioral intervention. It points toward a future where we help the nervous system naturally create healthier sleep, giving millions of people with chronic insomnia and short sleep a technology option that provides comparable sleep improvement to industry-leading prescription sleep medications."

Apollo's patented Vibes™ are silent sound wave vibrations in the bass frequency range of music, delivered and personalized through the Apollo app, that activate the vagus nerve — the body's primary pathway to calm and restoration — through gentle, rhythmic touch. By mirroring the biological signatures of a hug, Vibes prompt an immediate physiological response: heart rate slows and HRV improves as the nervous system shifts from stress into recovery, and from restlessness into sleep. This marks the second consecutive clinical study published demonstrating significant sleep benefits from use of the Apollo technology.

"What makes these findings particularly significant is that they reflect the real world, not a controlled environment," said Kathryn Fantauzzi, CEO & Co-Founder, Apollo Neuroscience. "Participants were Apollo customers using the product exactly as any customer would — no special protocols, no coaching, no researcher involvement. These outcomes don't require a clinical setting to replicate. They're achievable in the real world."

The study also demonstrated that more frequent Apollo use was associated with progressively longer deeper sleep, supporting a dose-dependent relationship between nighttime Apollo vibration exposure and total sleep time and quality.

When the COVID-19 lockdowns shut down all sleep labs indefinitely in 2020, the researchers switched to using Oura Ring to measure sleep. By providing continuous, research-grade biometric data outside the lab, the ring gave researchers the ability to observe therapeutic outcomes at scale in the context of everyday life, without requiring participants to change their behavior or enter a controlled setting. This is what makes the study's design significant beyond its findings: consumer wearables like Apollo Neuro and Oura Ring are ushering in a new frontier in research, where complex public health challenges like insomnia become solvable at scale.

Upon the completion of data collection in 2022, the researchers used the hundreds of millions of data points collected in the study to train AI models that resulted in the launch of SmartVibes™ by Apollo in 2023. SmartVibes AI collects sleep data in real time from the Apollo wearable to automatically detect and prevent nighttime wakeups before they happen, nearly doubling the sleep benefits observed in this study, where subjects were manually triggering Apollo to turn on at night. SmartVibes AI also collects data from Oura Ring and generates personalized vibrational rhythms that work in the background to improve health biometrics, automatically. This is the first example of how a closed-loop wearable ecosystem along with AI can be leveraged to meaningfully improve health. In 2025, Apollo users gained over 140 million minutes of extra sleep from using the technology.

The full manuscript is available through JMIR Publications:
JMIR Preprint: Association Between Duration of Transcutaneous Vibratory Stimulation Delivered by the Apollo Neuro Device and Extension of Total Sleep Time: https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/79588

About Apollo Neuroscience
Apollo Neuroscience is a health technology company developing scalable wearable and software products that improve sleep, resilience, relaxation, focus, and recovery through touch-based vibration stimulation. Apollo's patented technology delivers gentle vibrations that work with the body to effortlessly improve autonomic balance and well-being. Apollo has been used by hundreds of thousands of individuals worldwide, including professional athletes, clinicians, military veterans, and high-performance teams.
https://apolloneuro.com/

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SOURCE Apollo Neuroscience