The Effect of Beat Frequency Vibration on Sleep Latency and Neural Complexity: A Pilot Study

Insomnia affects millions of people worldwide, and non-pharmacological treatment options are limited. A bed excited with multiple vibration sources was used to explore beat frequency vibration (BFV) as a non-pharmacological treatment for insomnia. A repeated measures design pilot study of 14 participants with mild-moderate insomnia symptom severity (self-reported on the Insomnia Severity Index) was conducted to determine the effects of BFV, and traditional standing wave vibration (SWV) on sleep latency and sleep electrocortical activity. Participants were monitored using high-density electroencephalography (HD-EEG). Sleep latency was compared between treatment conditions. A trend of decreasing sleep latency due to BFV was found for unequivocal sleep latency (p ≤ 0.068). Neural complexity during wake, N1, and N2 stages were compared using Multi-Scale Sample Entropy (MSE), which demonstrated significantly lower MSE between wake and N2 stages (p ≤ 0.002). During N2 sleep, BFV showed lower MSE than the control session in the left frontoparietal region. As a measure of information integration, reduced entropy may indicate that BFV decreases conscious awareness during deeper stages of sleep. SWV caused reduced alpha activity and increased delta activity during wake. BFV caused increased delta activity during N2 sleep. These preliminary results suggest that BFV may help decrease sleep latency, reduce conscious awareness, and increase sleep drive expression during deeper stages of sleep. SWV may be beneficial for decreasing expression of arousal and increasing expression of sleep drive during wake, implying that beat frequency vibration may be beneficial to sleep.