Tyler Skluzacek was sick of seeing his father suffer from terrible nightmares, a result of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) he developed while fighting in the Iraq war.
So, he did something about it and created a Smartwatch app to stop those nightmares.
“When he came back from Iraq, all was different,” Tyler told KSTP. “The sleeping issues were affecting him in the worst way.”
Patrick Skluzacek’s PTSD would cause him to sweat and violently thrash around in his sleep.
His nightmares were so terrible that he was afraid to close his eyes.
As a result, he turned to vodka and pills in order to get sleep. It affected his life profoundly, causing his marriage and life to collapse.
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“[I] pretty much lost everything,” he told NPR. “My house, everything, my job, everything went.”
According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, the prevalence of PTSD among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is estimated to be between 13.5 to 30 percent in certain studies. Fifty-two percent of combat veterans with PTSD are said to suffer from night terrors.
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When Tyler heard about a computer hackathon that was focusing on developing prototypes for mobile applications to help people with PTSD when he was a senior at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn, he knew he had to attend.
So, he scrounged up all his money from his on-campus job and bought a ticket to Washington D.C. to attend the hackathon.
He and his team created a smartwatch program that can detect the onset of nightmares by monitoring the heart rate and movement of the wearer.
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The idea came from trying to imitate service dogs who can recognize night terrors and nudge or lick their owner to interrupt the nightmare.
Tyler says the app uses a light vibration that provides the wearer enough stimulus to pull them out of a deep REM cycle while allowing them to continue getting sleep.
Tyler was able to test the prototype out on his dad who refers to those vibrations as “little miracles.”
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“It was night and day when I put that watch on and it started working,” he said.
With the help of Tyler’s invention, Patrick was able to remarry and get back to work as a mechanic.
An investor purchased the rights to the app and started the company NightWare.
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The app was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, just before Veteran’s Day in 2020, and will be prescribed to veterans with PTSD through the VA.
“Finally coming to fruition, helping people, it’s just heartwarming and exciting to see,” Tyler said. “If I get one email in the next year from a veteran saying, ‘I used your product and helped me in ways nothing else could help me,’ I’ll be pumping my fist.”
https://www.facebook.com/NightWareApp/photos/a.1020258764705301/4064382136959600
NightWare expects its program to be helping veterans in the first quarter of 2021.
“There are prescribers in the military and Department of Defense that are dealing with this every day,” said company CEO Grady Hannah said. “I think it’s a great Minnesota story, the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs provided us a $100,000 grant to help us with our clinical trial, and that was really key.”
Learn more about this incredible story in the video below.
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