Friday, February 07, 2020

Experimenting to Improve Sleep Quality

comments on: Can a Humidifier Help You Sleep Better and Snore Less?

After doing some research I learned that humidifiers have helped folks snore less. So, after some more research, I picked up a slick little ultrasonic humidifier and gave it a try. Now, it’s been less than a week which I know isn’t enough to get too excited about statistically speaking. But one thing is becoming crystal clear…it’s most definitely helping me sleep better.

Interesting post, which includes control charts showing the impressive progress.

"I’m also still trying to figure out what caused the three special cause signals in January." One nice aspect of improvement is sometimes you can make a system improvement that even without knowing the causes of previous problems, the new improvement stops those from happening again. Maybe that won't be the case this time but maybe it will. Health related issues are so touchy that I could imagine it is something like a couple bad factors stacked on top just push things over the limit. So being a bit tired and say too low humidity and you didn't drink quite enough liquid and sleep quality is bad but just 1 or 2 of those and it might be a bit worse but not horrible.

Special cause signals will be more frequent if several factors together amplify each other (and they rarely happen together so those amplified results are rare). What happens is those rare amplified events will be special, outside of the system that generates that regular variation when they act alone but when all that variation lines up just right the result will be outside what is normal (due to the very large change in the result for that special case where the individual factors acting together (amplifying) create a very large change in the result.

Related: Gadgets to Mask Noise and Help You Sleep or Concentrate - Apply Management Improvement Principles to Your Situation - Zeo Personal Sleep Manager - Using Control Chart to Understand Free Throw Shooting Results