ARPA-H launches program to redefine sleep as a measurable, controllable driver of health 

New research funding opportunity seeks to transform how poor sleep is diagnosed and treated at home, in real time 

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), today announced the Restorative & health-Enhancing Sleep Time (REST) program, a research funding opportunity to develop the first closed-loop, in-home technologies that can objectively measure health-relevant features of sleep and adaptively correct poor sleep in real time across the night.

“Poor sleep is contributing to almost every chronic disease we’re fighting in this country, including dementia, depression, diabetes, and heart disease,” said ARPA-H Director Alicia Jackson. “If we solve this, we’re not just helping Americans feel better in the morning but navigating the trajectory of their health away from devastating disease and toward more healthy years of life. This is what ARPA-H exists to do.”

In the United States, approximately 150 million Americans struggle with poor sleep, with insomnia alone affecting roughly 86 million adults—yet existing treatments fail more than 70% of those people. Poor sleep more than doubles the risk for dementia, depression, hypertension, and diabetes, and contributes to an estimated $400 billion in annual economic burden.  

Despite this scale of impact, current tools for measuring sleep fall short in the home. Polysomnography, otherwise known as a sleep study, remains the clinical reference but is expensive and requires special medical instruments not suited for repeated, at-home use. Consumer wearables are scalable but lack the ability to track health-relevant brain activity features of sleep or provide personalized treatment during sleep. Every commercially available sleep score on the market today measures only broad sleep features, such as duration, timing, and sleep stages, rather than the underlying brain activity features of sleep most relevant to restoration and health.

If successful, REST will provide revolutionary insights into sleep by treating it as a controllable biological system—one that can be measured and improved through modulation at home. In doing so, REST will help lift insomnia treatment response from roughly 50% under today’s gold standard to at least 90%, and remission from 30% to at least 80%, while creating a path toward reducing long-term health risks associated with poor sleep, such as dementia, depression, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes.

REST will pursue two solicited technical areas: Measure & Diagnose, which seeks proposals to develop validated, in-home systems that capture sleep-relevant physiology and diagnose insomnia and other forms of poor sleep with clinical fidelity, and Control & Treat, which seeks proposals to develop noninvasive, closed-loop systems that adapt interventions to the user’s real-time physiology throughout the night. The program will be supported by a separate, non-solicited element focused on sleep-health modeling, data harmonization, benchmarking, cross-performer integration, and independent verification and validation.  

“We are at an inflection point for sleep health thanks to advances in AI, biosensing wearables, and noninvasive neuromodulation,” said REST Program Manager Nate Mohatt, Ph.D. “REST is designed around a simple but ambitious premise: we can more accurately measure sleep quality at home and correct it in real time. The future we’re building is one where Americans wake up better than they did the night before, every night, without ever stepping into a clinic.”

ARPA-H anticipates that teaming will be necessary to achieve the program’s goals. Prospective proposers are encouraged to form teams representing varied expertise from private and public entities to submit a research proposal. Other Transactions Agreements are anticipated for awarding contracts. The agency’s final investments will depend on the quality of the proposals received.

Learn more about REST on its program page, including information about the Innovative Solutions Opening and Proposers’ Day registration.