It turns out Apple Watch isn’t only touching lives with features like fall detection and atrial fibrillation alerts. A prescription app called NightWare is helping veterans who suffer from nightmares due to post-traumatic stress disorder. The app uses Apple Watch sensors and haptic feedback to detect and cleverly disrupt nightmares as they happen.
Apple highlights NightWare and how retired first sergeant Robert Guithues has used the solution to decrease stress from nightmares after his time serving in Afghanistan.
“Your mind and your psyche are not meant to take some of the stuff that you run across when you’re deployed and fighting a war,” the Army veteran of over 20 years told Apple. “As time went on, my nightmares became more vivid and physical — thrashing around, calling out names and commands. And if there was thunder or lightning outside, I wouldn’t go to bed until the sun came up. At my worst point after I got back from Afghanistan, I didn’t sleep for three months.”
Then Guithues read about an app called NightWare that requires a prescription and helps to disrupt nightmares. He asked his doctor about the app and received an Apple Watch and iPhone pre-configured to run the software.
“Some of the most horrific sights I’ve ever seen kept playing over and over, but when I started using NightWare, they stopped,” Guithues told Apple. “In the morning, the device will tell me it’s intervened 25 or 30 times through the night, and I never woke up once. It’s to the point where I don’t remember any of the old nightmares.”
Guithues credits the Apple Watch and NightWare with cutting the number of medications he takes in half and ultimately saving his life.
The NightWare system uses “the Apple Watch heart rate sensor, accelerometer, and gyroscope to detect a nightmare and then disrupt it through haptic feedback, generating gentle pulses on the wrist that gradually increase until the user is roused from the nightmare, but not from sleep,” Apple says. It’s also the only FDA-approved digital therapeutic for treating nightmares.
NightWare has already been prescribed to 400 patients in the United States, according to Apple. Almost all of the patients are active-duty military or veterans.
You can read much more about the NightWare system and how it’s using iPhone and Apple Watch to improve the lives of service members here. Veteran’s Day when we honor all service members is this Friday, November 11. Apple is also marking the date with a special Apple Watch Activity Challenge.
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