REST
Restorative & health-Enhancing Sleep Time
The Big Question
What if sleep were a controllable biological system—one we could measure, personalize, and optimize to improve health?
The Problem
- Nearly half of Americans struggle with poor sleep, and approximately 86 million adults experience insomnia.
- Poor sleep is associated with increased risk for depression, dementia, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions, contributing to an estimated $400 billion annual economic burden.
- Despite decades of sleep research, we can still only measure how much people sleep, not whether their sleep is helping them stay healthy.
- Today's sleep metrics focus primarily on broad measures such as duration, timing, and sleep stages.
- As a result, current treatments for poor sleep and insomnia fail for more than 70% of those struggling to get rest.
The Solutions
- The REST (Restorative and health-Enhancing Sleep Time) program will advance two technical areas: measure and diagnosis sleep quality at-home with clinical fidelity, and control & treat to develop non-invasive, closed-loop systems with real-time interventions throughout the night.
- Together, these components are intended to:
- Define sleep quality by identifying the physiological features of sleep that predict meaningful health outcomes.
- Measure those features accurately in home environments rather than only in specialized sleep laboratories.
- Control sleep quality in real time through adaptive, personalized interventions that respond to an individual's physiology throughout the night.
- If successful, REST could redefine sleep quality using health outcomes as the ground truth, enable clinically meaningful sleep assessment in the home, and create adaptive technologies that improve sleep in real time.
Only ARPA-H can...
- Bring together the full spectrum of capabilities needed to tackle this challenge, uniting experts across disciplines, institutions, and industry sectors around a common goal.
- Integrate discovery science, advanced sensing, machine learning, diagnostics, and intervention technologies into a unified system to redefine sleep quality using health outcomes as the ground truth.
- Create adaptive technologies that improve sleep in real time and enable clinically meaningful sleep assessment in the home.
Solicitation
What ARPA-H needs to solve this problem
ARPA-H encourages collaborations that integrate expertise across sleep medicine, neuroscience, psychiatry, biomedical engineering, wearable and in-home biosensing, signal processing, machine learning, neuromodulation, clinical trials, and regulatory science.
REST seeks bold, interdisciplinary approaches to develop objective, home-based, closed-loop systems that can measure sleep-relevant physiology, diagnose and mechanistically classify poor sleep with a primary emphasis on insomnia, and adapt treatment in real time throughout the night.
Notice ID: ARPA-H-SOL-26-159
ARPA-H invites interested parties to review the solicitation, which is posted and maintained on SAM.gov. The solicitation outlines the opportunity and its requirements, key dates and deadlines, submission documents and templates, evaluation criteria for submissions, and information on how to apply.
Key Dates:
- Solution Summary Due: August 12, 2026
A summary is required to submit a full proposal. - Full Proposal Due: Anticipated Fall 2026
Invited submissions only, details to follow.
Reminder: Dates are estimates and subject to change. Please reference the solicitation for the most up-to-date information.
Ready to apply? To submit, sign-in to the ARPA-H Solutions site.
Frequently Asked Questions
Review responses to common questions about this funding opportunity asked by others in the proposer community.
You can also ask a question.
Proposers' Day
This is an optional event for the proposer community to learn more about this opportunity, ask questions, and make connections. This event is not intended for patients, patient advocates, the media, or general interest audiences.
Event date: July 13, 2026.
Register by July 10, 2026 at 12:00PM ET.
Event location: Washington, D.C.
Notice ID: ARPA-H-SN-26-159
Details subject to change. Register for the event on the ARPA-H Solutions site.
Teaming
ARPA-H anticipates that teaming will be necessary to achieve the goals of this program. Prospective performers are encouraged to form teams with varied technical expertise to submit a research proposal.
To facilitate this process, we have created a teaming page where proposers can share their profiles and learn more about other interested parties.
Please note that by publishing the teaming profiles list, ARPA-H is not endorsing, sponsoring, or otherwise evaluating the qualifications of the individuals or organizations.
Program Manager
