Sleep better - with Shuttle XPCs
 Everything is quiet. Outside there’s nothing but darkness and silence. No glaring lights, no buzzing machines. In other words, perfect conditions for sleep. So what do you do when you can’t? Presently one in ten adults in Germany suffers from insomnia, and the Sleep Laboratory in Schleswig (in North Germany) is taking a high-tech approach into finding out why.
A lot of sufferers attempt to remedy their insomnia on their own, and when exercise, fresh air or reading doesn’t help any longer, many of them seek the advice of their GPs. Should a prescription for sleeping tablets not be enough, then treatment at of the more than 300 sleep laboratories in Germany generally follows.
There, the causes, types and characteristics of insomnia are examined, and the efficacy of the therapy measured.
It’s shortly after ten p.m. at the laboratory in Schleswig, and the only things the patients need tonight are their nightclothes and tooth brushes. Cables are attached all over their bodies, and during the night the many small electrodes stuck everywhere will record their brainwaves, as well as their eye, muscle, jaw and leg movements. Even the airflow from their noses will be measured. The electrodes won’t miss a thing. No heartbeat, breath or movement will go unrecorded, and all the information – the numbers, graph lines, and diagrams – will be saved on a computer hard drive beside the bed. Finally a camera and a microphone record everything that happens in this “high-tech bedroom”.
A final “good night” from the duty doctor, the light goes out and the door closes. The patient is then observed and all the data displayed on monitors, connected to the PC in the sleeping room, in an adjoining room.
This, obviously, is a situation where a computer that is extremely quiet and no larger than the white pages of a big city has its advantages. And so soon the sleep laboratory in Schleswig will soon have eight Shuttle XPC mini 100s at its disposal. The high memory capacity and data transfer demands of such work will be taken care of by the Shuttle XPC mini X 100’s high-performance Intel Core Duo processor, fast DDR2 memory and huge hard drive, and all the data backed-up using its DVD burner. But what convinced the sleep laboratory the most, was the Shuttle XPC mini X 100’s whisper quiet operation, its powerful external power supply providing this multi-faceted PC with energy without the use of a fan, and noiselessly. |