Like any tracking tool though, just tracking the data is not going to change anything. Just having the FitBit doesn’t make me more active, but being able to SEE how inactive I am helps to motivate me to get more active so I can see the changes. And the ZEO won’t make my sleep better, but being able to see how I am sleeping will help to motivate me to make and monitor the changes needed to sleep better!

First and foremost, I’m sorry for the email and phone mishaps that you mentioned above. We value customer support a great deal and don’t take this feedback lightly. Thank you for sharing it.

I want to tackle the accuracy question you mention above. I’ll caveat this by saying that you may have seen some of this before, but others reading this thread may have not. As you already know, Zeo is measuring your brainwaves to determine your sleep phase (there’s a blog post about that here: http://blog.myzeo.com/5-steps-to-phasing-sleep/ ). Using these tiny electrical signals to phase your sleep isn’t easy, but accuracy and scientific integrity are highly important to us. Studies have been done looking at the precision of our SoftWave technology compared to other sleep tracking technologies (including the current gold standard used in sleep labs). The technology has been shown to perform very accurately and the data have been reviewed by our scientific advisory board. You can review the results of these studies here: http://www.myzeo.com/pages/52_for_health_professionals.cfm#Validations

Like any method of measuring sleep, Zeo may occasionally indicate you were asleep when you were awake (or visa versa). There are a few things that could be causing this, but the most probable culprits in your instance are the following:
1. Zeo only records moments of wakefulness that last 2 minutes or longer. The reason is to align with memory (there are studies that suggest that people forget most awakenings that last less than 3 minutes). One unfortunate consequence of that rule is that when you leave the bedroom to go to the bathroom, Zeo loses signal (due to distance) for most of the time you are awake and never crosses the threshold to report an awakening. A pesky bug that we’ll fix in a future hardware release.
2. Other studies have been done to show that, in a sleep lab setting, moments of quiet wakefulness are difficult to distinguish from sleep. Zeo is not as accurate as a sleep lab and will sometimes make a mistake.

Though not perfect, Zeo is the most accurate way to track and improve your sleep at home. I know you’re tired of hearing it, but it’s important that I mention that it’s not a medical device – i.e. not intended to diagnose or treat sleep disorders (that’s for doctors)… which is a nice segway into the discussion about Expert Answers.

As Mike mentioned, Expert Answers is a new initiative that we’re testing and learning much from. We do take the questions that people ask us and bring them to experts; if someone submits a new question that can be answered in part by an old expert answer, we will use it. We’re working on being more transparent through that process.

The biggest challenge *by far* has been walking the fine line between helpful consumer oriented information (that’s us) and medical advice (which we can not provide). When folks submit questions that a doctor should answer, often just saying, “You should consult your doctor” is not enough – we try to answer what we can in a responsible fashion, which sometimes causes extended delays in our response to you, the user. Definitely not ideal, but something we will continue to refine and that (I expect) will become quicker and easier with time.

Again, I apologize for the the trouble and genuinely appreciate your feedback and am open to continuing the conversation in the open (here) or in private (via email).

Kind regards,
Derek@Zeo
[derek@myzeo.com]

PS ~ Mike, thank you.

I have emailed in questions and posted questions on their forum to either go unanswered or to get what are obviously generic answers that have probably been copied from a catalogue of questions and answers they have saved. And of course, the answers are always qualified with the statement that we are all different, and your numbers will be different than my numbers, and Zeo is not a medical device. OK, OK, I get that by now. I called several times to speak to someone. After being on hold for a while you get placed into voice mail. I sent an email saying that I need someone to call. I actually had a lady call and she let me ask my questions. She seemed interested and said that she would email answers to my questions. When I got an email several days later it was obvious that all she did was copy and paste a couple of questions and answers that were remotely related to what we had talked about, and didn’t even mention the more critical questions that I had for her. Probably because it wasn’t in her catalogue of questions and answers. This would be a really neat product if I trusted the numbers and if their “Ask the Experts” forum allowed you to ask questions and get real answers from real experts. Oh, well.

Short answer: Yes.

Longer Answer: I wrote this review after I received the product last summer. The review was not sponsored nor endorsed in any way by the company. It still isn’t. Several months after writing the review, Zeo started a “Refer a friend” campaign that was, and still is, open to all of its customers who have purchased their product. I’m simply a participant in that program. This review gets a lot of traffic, so I figured if I could save you all the cost of shipping, why not? The very small reward I get for the referrals is just a plus.

Hope that answers your question. The content of the review has not been changed, minus the bottom “UPDATE” and the single edit at the top about the price change.

Regardless, hope you get it worked out. Try talking to support before returning it maybe? It could be one of the simple issues I mentioned above, and if not, they'll get you taken care of I'm sure.