Veterans Are Able to Get Rid of Nightmares Thanks to NightWare and the Apple Watch.

While a soldier in the Army for more than 20 years, including deployments in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, Robert Guithues developed nightmares due to PTSD.

Each night for more than 10 years, Robert Guithues dreaded closing his eyes and sleeping. It's because the moment he fell asleep, he was taken back to the oil fields that were burning on the outskirts of Baghdad or to a forward-operating station in Afghanistan's mountains. Afghanistan, where his unit was attacked for 278 days of the year-long assignment there.

"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," says Guithues, who retired as the first sergeant within the Army in 2012 after serving over 20 years. "As the years passed, my nightmares got more intense and physical. I ran around, shouting out names and orders." If there was lightning or thunder out, I would not stay in bed until the sun was up. "When I was at my lowest, when I returned from Afghanistan, I couldn't go to bed for all of three months."

The whole situation changed when the user discovered NightWare.

NightWare is a digital therapy system that works together with the Apple Watch and iPhone to stop the nightmares associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. 1 Only with a prescription is this medication available.It's also the first and only digital therapy designed specifically for treating nightmares that has been approved by the FDA. 2 NightWare uses information from the Apple Watch heart rate sensor as well as the accelerometer and gyroscope to detect a nightmare and then interrupt it with tactile feedback, which produces gentle pulses that are triggered on the wrist and gradually increase to the point that the patient is freed from the nightmare but not asleep.

Every night before bed, Robert Guithues launches NightWare on his Apple Watch.

The prototype was designed by Tyler Skluzacek in 2015, as he was studying the field of computer technology on the computer science course at Macalester College in Minnesota. His father had suffered from PTSD throughout his service in the military, and Skluzacek was interested in seeing if technology could offer a solution. The idea was inspired by the way that a service dog gently nuzzles its owner to stop the nightmare.

Shortly after creating his prototype, Skluzacek was introduced to Grady Hannah, who is now NightWare's chief executive. Hannah has worked for the past seven years to bring NightWare to market and credits Apple's ecosystem for being important to this process.

"We had to get an independent security audit and submit it for FDA clearance," Hannah says. Hannah. "And since NightWare is compatible with the iPhone or Apple Watch, I think the security and quality of these products were the key factors in obtaining this approval." "We want to ensure that NightWare functions properly for all the people who have contributed an enormous amount of their time and energy."

Brian Robertson is a sleep medicine doctor who worked for over twenty-five years serving in the Army and retired as a colonel. Prior to his appointment as NightWare's chief medical officer, he was the director of the Sleep Disorder Clinic at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Through the thousands of patients that he has treated during his professional career, Robertson has witnessed firsthand the devastating results of PTSD. Around eighty percent of PTSD patients experience insomnia, nightmares, and sleep disorders. These factors raise the risk of suicide, and the suicide rate of US veterans is 52 percent higher than that of non-veterans.

To begin the process of launching NightWare, the user has to press the start button on the Apple Watch, which draws on the information that comes from accelerometers, the heart rate sensor, and a gyroscope to identify the presence of a nightmare. When the user awakes at the crack of dawn, they just hit stop to close the program.

"Before NightWare, we didn't really have any great solution for nightmares, and that's a huge problem because for so many active-duty and retired service members, they are debilitating," Robertson says. Robertson. "There is a drug that a large number of them are on called Prazosin that is a blood pressure medication; however, it isn't effective for a lot of patients, and it has many adverse effects and affects your performance in athletics." "For military personnel in sports, performance is crucial."

Robert Guithues knew Prazosin well following his return from Afghanistan; the drug was among the 30 medications he took every day to treat the injuries he sustained during his time deployed, which included PTSD as well as nightmares. But sleeping was still difficult, and he was convinced there needed to be a better way to get there instead of the pills, which he believed caused more harm to the body than good.

In the year 2018, he came across an article on NightWare, which prompted him to ask his physician to write an order for a set of devices that comprised the Apple Watch and iPhone. After the device arrived, they had been equipped with NightWare and were ready for use.

Robert Guithues now gets an average of between seven and nine hours of rest each night due to NightWare.

On the second night using the program, Guithues slept for nine hours. This had not happened to him in over 10 years. He attributes NightWare with restoring his mind, helping to reduce the amount of drugs that he's on by half, and also saving his life.

"Some of the most horrific sights I've ever seen kept playing over and over, but when I started using NightWare, they stopped," says Guithues. "In the morning, the device tells me that it's played up to 30 times during the night, but I never awoke." It's at a point where I'm not even able to recall any of the nightmares of my past.

And he's certainly not alone.

At present, NightWare is prescribed to 400 patients across the US, the majority of whom are active-duty veterans or military. A study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that those who took NightWare at least 50 percent of the time reported significantly better sleep-related quality when compared with those who did not use NightWare.

"The results of our first published clinical trial demonstrate NightWare's efficacy, and Apple technology is a critical part of that," says Hannah, who is NightWare's CEO. "NightWare benefits from so many unique features of the Apple ecosystem – the hardware and design of the Apple Watch, quality control standards, ease of software integration and deployment – it all comes together to create a system that is changing lives."

Guithues believes that NightWare can help a lot of other members of the military, particularly since it's not a prescription drug and won't impact the status of their deployment.