“We call it noise cancellation — but for your brain.” — Meredith Perry, CEO of Elemind
I’ve known Meredith Perry long enough to know she doesn’t mess around. The first time I really understood how her brain works, we were in the back seat of a car driving from the airport to Sedona. Everyone was complaining about swollen ankles from the flight. Most people just groan and move on. Meredith immediately started designing a product…cute sandals that could disguise flight-puffed ankles. She called them “cankle flops.” I was fascinated. That instinct, to see a problem and immediately engineer a solution, is just how she’s wired.
So when she told me she’d built a headband that reads your brainwaves and uses precisely timed sound pulses to guide your brain from wakefulness into sleep…I wasn’t shocked. I was curious. And after sitting down with her on The Heart of Innovation, the show I co-host with interventional cardiologist Dr. John Phillips, I walked away convinced this is one of the most important health technologies I’ve covered in years. Not just because of what it does for sleep, but because of what sleep does to your heart.
When Sleep Became a Cardiovascular Variable
Here’s what I didn’t fully appreciate before this episode: sleep is no longer just a lifestyle concern. It’s a cardiovascular variable, and the medical community is treating it that way.
A 2022 study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology followed more than 7,000 adults and found that people sleeping fewer than six hours a night faced a significantly higher risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease compared to those sleeping seven to eight hours. The American Heart Association now lists sleep duration as one of eight pillars of cardiovascular health in its Life’s Essential 8 framework. Research in the European Heart Journal has tied short and fragmented sleep to elevated risks of coronary heart disease and stroke.
Dr. John Phillips, who treats cardiovascular and vascular patients every day, confirmed what the research shows. “Statistically speaking, 10 to 15 percent of all adults have insomnia,” he told me on air. “And consistently poor sleep puts real stress on the cardiovascular system… elevated blood pressure, disrupted heart rate, increased sympathetic tone. We see it in our patients all the time.”
Six and a Half Years to Get Here
Meredith launched Elemind in 2019. She thought it would take two years to reach the market. It took more than six. Seven hardware iterations. Four years of getting the comfort right because, as she put it with characteristic bluntness, if people won’t wear it to sleep, none of the technology matters.
“It would be massive. But it’s life or death,” she said. “Like, if you’re selling a product that people are going to wear to sleep and it’s not comfortable… it doesn’t matter how good your technology is. They’ll just toss it out and then your company goes bankrupt.”
So she waited. And iterated. And waited some more. The version on the market today is lighter than a kiwi fruit, pillow-soft on the sides, and designed to work whether you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach. I asked about stomach sleepers specifically — I’m one — and she pointed out that even stomach sleepers turn their heads to breathe. The device is thin enough to handle it.
How a NASA Researcher Started Thinking About Your Brain
Here’s the part of the origin story I found most fascinating. Meredith didn’t come to sleep through insomnia. She came to it through a much bigger question: what if medicine could intervene earlier, before disease sets in, without pharmaceuticals that alter the whole body systemically? What if the brain itself could be influenced from the outside, in a targeted way?
That question led her to MIT neuroscientist Dr. Ed Boyden, one of the leading figures in neuroscience, and conversations about what she calls read-write neurotechnology. Not just measuring the brain’s electrical activity, the way an EEG does passively. But actually writing back to it. Interacting with it. Changing it.
Dr. Boyden and Meredith’s other co-founders had already been developing neuromodulation techniques to do exactly that, and their first application wasn’t sleep at all. It was tremor control. They showed that the same type of precisely timed acoustic stimulation could help someone with essential tremor or Parkinson’s disease physically stop shaking. The brain’s patterns, it turns out, can be interrupted and redirected from the outside using sound.
“If you can change the brain, you can change behavior,” Meredith explained. “And by behavior, I mean you can move someone from an awake state to a sleep state. Sleep was our first application — but it won’t be our last.”
Sleep made sense as the entry point for a few reasons. It’s universal…everyone sleeps, or tries to. The transition from wakefulness to sleep is one of the most well-mapped brainwave sequences in neuroscience. And it’s a problem that affects tens of millions of people who are desperate for something that isn’t a pill. Meredith saw a clear lane and took it.
How It Actually Works — Because I Made Her Explain It Simply
I’ll be honest: I asked Meredith to break this down for the lay person, because neuromodulation is not exactly dinner table vocabulary. Here’s what she told me.
The brain is an electrochemical organ, constantly producing electrical activity that we can measure from the outside using EEG sensors, the same way an EKG measures the heart. Different frequencies tell us what state the brain is in. When you close your eyes and you’re still awake, your brain is producing high-frequency alpha waves. As you drift toward sleep, those frequencies slow down predictably.
Elemind has five EEG sensors embedded in the headband that read those brainwave patterns in real time. When the device detects patterns associated with wakefulness, it sends a brief pulse of pink noise…not through your ears, but through a bone conductor pressed against your forehead. The skull vibrates. Your brain interprets that as sound. And if the pulse hits at precisely the right moment in the brainwave cycle, it disrupts the wakefulness pattern.
“There’s a specific moment along the wave that, if you hit it with a stimulus, the pattern is maximally disrupted. It’s the timing that matters…not the sound itself.”
She compared it to an ocean wave. Hit it at the right angle at the right moment, and you can cancel it out. She called it noise cancellation for the brain. Once the device detects that you’ve actually fallen asleep, the stimulation fades. And if you wake up in the middle of the night, there’s a button on the underside of the band…what the Elemind team calls the go-back-to-sleep button…that restarts the whole process.
Later this year, they’re releasing a deep sleep stimulation feature via firmware update. That means people who buy the device today don’t need to buy a new one — it just gets better through software.
What I Really Wanted to Know: How Is This Different From My Oura Ring Collecting Dust?
I’ll be transparent about this: I got an Oura Ring years ago when I interviewed someone from the company. It sat in a box almost immediately. And I stopped wearing my Apple Watch because it kept pinging me in the middle of the night while supposedly tracking my sleep. I raised this with Meredith, and her answer was clarifying.
Most sleep wearables are read-only. They measure what happens and report it back to you in the morning. Elemind is read-write. It’s not tracking your sleep to show you data…it’s actively intervening while the transition is happening. Every sound pulse is a real-time response to your specific brain activity at that exact moment.
“That’s why you can’t just play pink noise from your phone and call it a day,” she said. “We have to read the brain in real time to know how to stimulate. Without that, it’s just ambient sound, which is very different from neuromodulation.”
That distinction matters more than it sounds. The difference between a babbling brook app and a device that reads and responds to your brain is the difference between hoping you relax and actually changing the electrical state of your brain.
The Clinical Trial She Didn’t Have to Do
Here’s something I respect enormously about Meredith: she ran a clinical trial even though she didn’t have to. Wellness devices don’t require FDA approval or peer-reviewed evidence. Most companies skip the science entirely. Elemind chose not to.
“There’s a lot of snake oil out there,” she said. “We will not make a single claim that isn’t backed by a clinical trial and peer reviewed in a scientific journal. All of our papers are in the Nature portfolio.”
The trial showed that 76% of people with sleep onset insomnia could fall asleep in roughly half the time when using Elemind versus their baseline. And this wasn’t self-reported, the brainwave data was scored by independent polysomnographers who didn’t know which condition the participants were in. No bias. Just brainwaves.
Real-world data backs it up too. From approximately 10,000 users in 2025, people were consistently falling asleep in an average of 11 minutes — regardless of the day of the week or the season. That consistency, she noted, is genuinely unusual. Sleep patterns typically vary. Elemind’s apparently don’t.
One Thing Elemind Is Not, And One Surprising Partnership
I want to be clear about something, because viewers asked during our live taping and it’s worth addressing directly: Elemind does not treat obstructive sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a structural problem…the airway collapses, oxygen drops, the brain wakes you up. That requires a physical intervention, and the CPAP machine remains the standard of care. Elemind cannot and does not replace it.
But here’s what’s interesting: Elemind is partnering with ResMed, the leading CPAP manufacturer, on a clinical study…not to treat sleep apnea, but to study whether Elemind can improve CPAP adherence. The CPAP has a notorious compliance problem. A lot of people get prescribed it and stop using it because falling asleep with a mask strapped to your face is genuinely uncomfortable. The hypothesis is that if Elemind can help someone fall asleep faster, the discomfort of the mask becomes easier to tolerate and more people actually stick with the therapy. If that holds up, a wellness device becomes a clinical tool — just not in the way viewers assumed.
There’s also a pain angle that surfaced near the end of our show. A viewer with peripheral artery disease called in — he described lying awake all night dangling his legs over the bed because of ischemic pain, waiting on insurance authorization for a procedure to fix blocked arteries. Meredith mentioned that Elemind has conducted a trial using its deep sleep stimulation technology alongside sedation anesthesia and found participants could tolerate more pain before waking from the procedure. Whether that translates to helping people sleep through chronic pain at home isn’t yet known. But the question is now being asked.
The Campaign That Made Me Love This Company
I have to talk about Sleeping with the CEO… because it’s one of the most creative, confident marketing campaigns I’ve seen in health tech.
Meredith takes a lawn chair into the streets of New York City. Washington Square Park. The High Line. Giants tailgates. Airplane cabins. She approaches strangers, asks them to lie down and put on the headband, and films them falling asleep. She naps alongside them. She calls the campaign Sleeping with the CEO.
“We got thrown out of Times Square by a police officer,” she told me. I loved that. “But the point was: if you can fall asleep in the middle of Times Square with Elemind on, you can fall asleep anywhere.”
What I find compelling about this isn’t just the boldness. It’s what it says about the product’s confidence. Sleep wearables have a notorious drawer problem…people buy them, wear them for a week, and abandon them. The fact that Meredith is out here demonstrating this on skeptical strangers in the loudest city in America, and it’s working, tells me something about how much she trusts what she’s built.
What’s Next — and Why It Matters
Sleep is just the beginning. As Meredith put it: “Sleep is our Trojan horse into the rest of the brain.” The longer vision is a device that tracks and optimizes brain health overnight — starting with sleep, moving toward tremor control, cognitive health, and beyond. The technology she’s built can, in principle, be integrated into headphones, eyeglasses, VR headsets, or anything that touches the head.
For now it’s a wellness device — not a prescription product — and it’s available directly to consumers. An optional subscription unlocks sleep data and advanced features. You can use FSA and HSA dollars toward the purchase.
I left this interview thinking about the patient who called in with his legs dangling over the bed at 3am. I thought about the CPAP machine sitting on somebody’s nightstand, unworn. I thought about Dr. John’s comment that sleep is now sitting beside cholesterol and blood pressure as a driver of cardiovascular disease. And I thought about how, for all of the data and the science and the seven iterations and the clinical trials, what Meredith Perry really built is something that actually works — on strangers, on planes, in Times Square, in the dark.
That’s not nothing. That might be everything. Learn more at elemindtech.com.
Citations
1. Dominguez F, et al. “Association of Sleep Duration With Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease Risk.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 2022;79(15):1475–1485.
2. Daghlas I, et al. “Sleep Duration and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke.” European Heart Journal. 2021;42(35):3549–3557.
3. Lloyd-Jones DM, et al. “Life’s Essential 8.” Circulation. 2022;146:e18–e43.
4. Makarem N, et al. “Sleep Duration and 24-Hour Blood Pressure Patterns.” Hypertension. 2020;75(2):497–505.
5. Christensen MA, et al. “Sleep Fragmentation and Incident Atrial Fibrillation.” Journal of the American Heart Association. 2023;12:e028942.
