In February 2020, Apollo Neuro, a startup that had raised $7 million in seed funding and had just launched, was set to do three sleep studies that would test whether its vibrational wrist-worn device could improve a person’s ability to sleep. At that point, they had 4,500 active users of their first generation wearable.
When the pandemic hit in March, his studies, which were to be conducted inside of sleep labs, were knocked offline. But Dr. Dave Rabin pivoted. He knew that a good chunk of Apollo Neuro users also had an Oura Ring, a wearable that tracks sleep. Oura’s sleep tracking platform was not quite as good as polysomnography, the gold standard for sleep research, but it was pretty close. He reached out to the company and asked if he could use their platform to see the impact of the Apollo Neuro on users’ sleep. Oura said yes.