SWEET DREAMS: Local sleep wellness company develops fabrics to read brainwaves
- Matt Thies
- Nov 4
- 9 min read
Updated: Nov 4
There are many people who don't get enough sleep (or enough good sleep) regularly. Whether it's because of work, children, health, personal habits, or a combination thereof—we've all literally rolled out of our beds, wiped our eyes and zombie-walked to the coffee maker. While a little sleep deprivation every now and then is an inconvenience, the long-term effects of sustained sleep deprivation (or interrupted sleep, such as sleep apnea), are well-known. A few common examples are increased heart health risks and memory loss, and experts are still learning about it as we speak.
But what if something as seemingly mundane as your pillowcase could offer you insights and guidance on how to improve your quality of life—or predict life-changing diagnoses by as much as 15 years? Hold on to your teddy bears and blankies, today, we're talking about AI fabrics that can read your mind (sort of).
I sat down with CEO Rob Cooley to discuss Nuream AI's new product, and by sheer chance over the course of writing this article, also got to meet Nuream's other co-founders, COO Nathan Munton and CPO Lauren Munton, as well as their Chief AI Scientist, Karl Ricanek Jr, Ph.D. from UNC-Wilmington.
A Sleep Epidemic
Nuream CEO and co-founder Rob Cooley served in the Army and as Army Reserve Chief of Staff for 37 years and understands sleep deprivation. In April 2024, the Government Office of Accountability published its own study on sleep deprivation throughout the military. Cooley experienced it firsthand in his military career, often making the same dark joke that many who operate long hours have in the past: “We'll sleep when we're dead.”
"In the warfighting community, none of us sleep well. And so I thought, you know, my lack of sleep was just because of a couple of decades in the military. When I really looked at it, I said, 'No, no, it's an epidemic in society,'” Cooley says. “So, 70 million Americans—just Americans–—say they have sleep problems, and most of those are acute problems.”
Cooley began his career in life sciences at West Point, where he studied chemistry and chemical engineering. While he admits he didn't use this training much during his time as a field artillery officer on active duty or even as a civil affairs officer in the Army Reserve. He returned to the world of pharma/biotech after he left active duty in 1995, and joined the Army Reserve quickly after and rose in the ranks to a General Officer with the final role as Chief of Staff of the Army Reserve Command at Fort Bragg, NC with oversight to more than 200,000 Soldiers in Army civilians. While there he spent a decade as a corporate venturist working within the Philips Medical Systems whose portfolios included novel breakthroughs such as patient monitoring services, clinical informatics, and telemedicine. He also deployed overseas multiple times with the Army reserve during this time.
"So Nuream is the nexus of that. I can't sleep. I know how important sleep is. It's a personal requirement for me to kind of solve the sleep epidemic for our warfighters, first responders, etc.,” he continues. “And it's not more sleep, it's better restorative sleep. The right sleep stages where your brain actually needs to heal [and] recover."
Nathan Munton, COO and co-founder is also motivated by his own experiences and the mission of sleep wellness. Munton shared that he has multiple sclerosis (MS), which directly affects the brain and spinal cord and can leave lesions on either that can have permanent effects. The flare-ups, aside from being potentially detrimental long-term, are also excruciating.
"It's like, if you shook a live electrical wire around inside your body," Munton describes.
Munton's background is in furniture manufacturing and part of where Nuream's initial catalyst began, developing hypoallergenic mattresses designed for multiple body and sleep types to promote getting a good night's sleep. Part of his mission with Nuream's neurosensing fabric is to predict MS flare-ups so that people have time to contact their doctor, adjust medication, and generally provide the necessary data to manage the condition better.
Cooley also goes on to touch on a few of these concepts, as all brain health is directly tied to one's overall health. Hypoallergenic mattresses, for example, are important because even mild allergic symptoms can cause the brain to swell during sleep and increase neurological issues such as cognitive fog.
Other short-term sleep issues are poor decision making, irritability, less energy and less mental acuity. Long-term sleep loss leads to multiple neurodegenerative diseases, mental health considerations, suicidal ideation, and many more. Nuream's technology aims to develop and drive condition-specific algorithms to look for the sleep architecture disturbances and anomalies that are lead indicators to serious physical, mental and emotional conditions, such as multiple sclerosis (MS) or epilepsy.
Nuream's Fabric as a Sensor (FaaS)(TM) platform is a dual-use solution—meaning it delivers incredible insight to both the consumer markets and the Department of Defense environments, concurrently.
"If you are diagnosed with a particular issue,” Cooley explains, “we can run a condition-specific algorithm against your sleep data, and we can identify those earliest warnings. Then, you can bring that person to specific care right away rather than waiting for the heart attack to occur, and then go to the emergency room. So, getting ‘left of Boom' is what we call it."
Left of "Boom"
So just how does one get "Left of 'Boom'" and prevent or treat issues faster? According to Cooley, it starts with meeting the consumer where they are. The first step is introducing something that offers accuracy and comfort—in other words, something that does not hinder sleep itself. You can't expect someone to wear an EEG (electroencephalogram) cap to bed, or some sensor-heavy exoskeletal shirt. Even less intrusive wearables, like watches, fitbits, or garmins aren't ideal. The idea of the neurosensing fabric pillowcase that reads brainwaves via electromagnetic signals is a natural one, as it filters out the other noise in the bedroom, and only reads the person's brain who's touching it.
Think of the isolation of the signal as similar to wireless phone charging—it works but the phone must touch it to establish the connection, and doesn't interrupt or connect to anything else in the room.
Nuream teamed up with Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFoA) to pioneer their unique neurosensing fabrics, which led to their first grant from the Department of Defense, and have built a solid foundation in goals and ideology for their company. The four pillars of Nuream's Fabric as a Sensor (FaaS)(TM) platform solution are:
advanced neurosensing materials
neurodata curation and protection
specific neuroalgorithm delivery
neurodata insight delivery
"The end state of our FaaS is better outcomes for you, the consumer, the patient, for your clinical care, your care continuum. You know, this is thoughtful use of the right data at the right time to provide the right insight to take action," Cooley says.
At encore's Introductory Community Science Panel "What is AI?" on October 22 at UNCW, panelist Karl Ricanek Jr, Ph.D. spoke about his work with Nuream's neurosensing fabrics. As Nuream's Chief AI Scientist, he explains transformative neurosensing materials in Nuream's pillowcase allows us to collect brainwaves while "meeting people where they are."
The patient starts with a pillowcase at night, then compression wear apparel, and eventually (if necessary or requested), a wristband to provide near 24-hour neurodata capture opportunity.
Dr. Ricanek mentions that the market currently has other products, such as watches or rings that monitor vitals. However, those monitor correlated information, and not the original information itself; and while that information is better than nothing, it also leaves a lot of room for error.
One could consider it the same way that if there were an offshore hurricane, measuring and predicting that weather system based on shore conditions like surf and riptides would be correlated information. While some highly trained and experienced experts could probably make some fairly accurate predictions about the nature of the storm, it would never be as reliable as flying a storm chaser through the eye of the hurricane.
The ability to use this unique data-capture method, and to do it in a natural environment—the person's home and personal bed—is just as important because a person's sleep routine naturally varies in a clinic. With Nuream's technology, participants have a dashboard on their phone that tracts neurodata and organizes it so they can dial in the best sleep routine, diet, mattress, sleep apnea machine, etc. Knowing the variables offers the user the ability to change them. With consent, or if it’s a prescribed measure, participants can share data with Nuream and licensed medical facilities. Then the data is compared to these condition-specific algorithms and individuals have a new tool to stay "Left of Boom."
"We now have the ability to harness and unleash the power of the brain," Cooley says.
Four Pillars: Medical over Marketing
Nuream proudly presents themselves as "Medical over Marketing." While any business has to make money, their goal is to improve wellness, address the sleep epidemic, and provide those leading indicators for the most serious and debilitating diseases, conditions and considerations.
While still testing this latest pillow product at UNCW’s labs, Nuream mattresses and bed materials are already on the market. Sold as organic, hypoallergenic, and designed for overall wellness for anyone who sleeps on them, they sell bed bases and sheets as well. Having bought a new higher-end mattress in the recent past, I was surprised that Nuream's highest-end model topped out at around $4,000, and that every option (regardless of price) had financing options. In contrast, other mattress companies sell what appears to be a similar product for twice the price. So is this the health equity and access part of Nuream's plan?
"It's part of our DNA," Cooley says. "You know, we could charge $10,000 for a mattress like that. That's not the intent. Yes, we need to make a profit. But the idea is to spread this as much as possible, spread this throughout society, create this idea of healthy sleep that leads to improved performance, which leads to a better improved society. It's a must have from our perspective."
Cooley continues with the more far-reaching aspects of their ideology: "You know, the number is, on average, 22 [suicides] a day [in the military]. That's the number that's been thrown out in the public space. As a guy who, in the Army Reserve, had to study every single suicide in the reserve, the numbers are more like 40 or 50 a day. That's active duty, that's veterans—because people don't want to qualify, you know, a death as a suicide, but there's plenty of other suicides that are suicide by overdose, or suicide by car, or cop or whatever it is."
Ultimately, Cooley says, there hasn't been enough done to change the paradigm, or address the root causes that fuel suicidal ideation. Especially with former and current service members. In addition, the lack of mental health providers, treatment facilities, and caregivers are necessary support systems to help people before they spiral.
"There's a stigma in the military,” he notes. “If I put my hand up and say 'I need help,' then I'm broken, or I'm not a good operator, I'm not a good brother or sister. The stigma's horrible, but that stigma is not only military, right? I just talk about the military example, because we can study it very, very acutely. It's really the same thing in society. I can't change that, but I can change the ability to look for those markers early and then move the right care to that particular person."
To that end, Cooley and company started The Nuream Foundation non-profit to use their data to help the entire care continuum.
"We want to use all human data to include our neural data to provide the means to deliver improved mental health, and mental well-being outcomes, because we truly believe neurodata is going to fundamentally change what we think about it. So that's where we founders want to put some of our efforts back. And that's a social currency."
Revival of North Carolina Textiles?
Nuream is already an established sleep wellness company with its home sleep products. After the neurosensing fabric is out of its prototype phase, they plan to release it directly to consumers and then license it to other manufacturers, such as athletic brands, military products, medical providers, professional, college and youth athletics, and other mattress or wellness companies.
As one of UNCW's Brain Health Resilience Hub partners, Nuream is deeply connected to the Wilmington area, and wants to curate a life sciences tech ecosystem alongside the existing Fintech companies in town like Apiture, Live Oak Bank, and nCino. Cooley says he's even talked to Morris Nguyen of Predicate AI Labs about possible collaborations in the future to further facilitate this ecosystem.
Like the other local pioneers, Nuream wants to partner with UNCW with exciting, transformative research and science on a commercialization pathway to attract the right students and professors to Wilmington, as well as the right workforce. And it's not just looking for developers, engineers, and data scientists, either.
Their product depends on the development, design, and eventual manufacturing of novel neurosensing fabrics and yarns. These products don't have sensors sewn into them—the threads are the sensors. Which sounds an awful lot like a similar North Carolina industry.
"You know, North Carolina used to be one of the global leaders in textiles, manufacturing. We offshored it, we want to bring that back on. We think we could be a big part of that."