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Insomnia and the smartphone

Modern tech is accused of interfering with our sleep, but could a phone app provide the cure?

Modern tech is accused of interfering with our sleep, keeping us up late anxiously staring at our phone screens. But could a phone app provide the cure?

Roughly one in three people in most developed countries typically tell surveys that the suffer from insomnia. The ±«Óãtv's Laurence Knight is one of them. He seeks the advice of sleep physician Dr Guy Leschziner of Guy's Hospital in London, who explains how sleep and anxiety can become a vicious circle.

The good news is that there is a new non-drug treatment that is proving remarkably successful - cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia. The bad news is that there are nowhere near enough trained clinicians able to provide treatment. That provides a gap in the market - and one that Yuri Maricich of US medical tech firm Pear Therapeutics hopes to fill with a mobile phone app of all things.

(Picture: Cell phone addict man awake at night in bed using smartphone; Credit: OcusFocus/Getty Images)

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18 minutes

Last on

Fri 17 Jan 2020 13:32GMT

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  • Fri 17 Jan 2020 08:32GMT
  • Fri 17 Jan 2020 13:32GMT

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