Why ARPA-H is Seeking Solutions for Sleep Health
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), through its Proactive Health Office (PHO), has released an Innovative Solutions Opening (ISO) for the Restorative and health-Enhancing Sleep Time (REST) program (ARPA-H-SOL-26-159). REST seeks to fundamentally change how sleep quality is measured, diagnosed, and treated by developing technologies that can assess and improve restorative sleep in home environments.
According to ARPA-H, approximately 150 million Americans struggle with poor sleep, including an estimated 86 million adults experiencing insomnia. Poor sleep has been linked to increased risk of depression, dementia, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions, while contributing hundreds of billions of dollars in economic burden each year. Despite decades of research, current sleep technologies primarily focus on broad metrics such as duration, timing, and sleep stages rather than determining whether sleep is actually promoting long-term health.
Through REST, ARPA-H aims to establish sleep as a measurable and controllable biological system. The program’s ultimate goal is to define sleep quality using health outcomes as the ground truth, enabling more precise diagnostics and personalized interventions that improve health over time.
Technical Areas for Better Sleep Health
REST is organized around two solicited Technical Areas (TAs), both centered on improving the understanding and treatment of insomnia.
TA1: Bringing Clinical Sleep Insights Into the Home
Technical Area 1 (TA1), Measure & Diagnose, focuses on developing consumer-grade systems capable of measuring sleep-related physiological signals with clinical fidelity in home environments.
ARPA-H is seeking approaches that can move beyond traditional sleep tracking to identify sleep microstructures, classify mechanistic subtypes of insomnia, and generate objective diagnostic insights. Potential technologies may include wearable EEG devices, smartwatches, rings, under-mattress sensors, and other advanced sensing platforms capable of translating clinical sleep assessments into practical at-home tools.
TA2: Personalized Sleep Intervention in Real Time
Technical Area 2 (TA2), Control & Treat, focuses on developing noninvasive, closed-loop systems that can monitor sleep physiology and adapt treatment throughout the night.
The goal is to create personalized intervention systems that respond to an individual’s real-time sleep state and physiology. ARPA-H encourages approaches that leverage technologies such as neuromodulation, acoustic stimulation, haptics, targeted nerve stimulation, and other noninvasive methods capable of improving sleep quality and treating insomnia through adaptive feedback loops.
Program Structure and Requirements
REST is structured as a 66-month program divided into three phases focused on proving the core technical thesis, demonstrating proof-of-concept, and supporting clinical translation and commercialization preparation. Organizations may propose to TA1, TA2, or both Technical Areas.
ARPA-H encourages multidisciplinary teams that bring together expertise in sleep medicine, neuroscience, psychiatry, biomedical engineering, wearable and in-home biosensing, machine learning, signal processing, neuromodulation, clinical research, and regulatory science. Awards may be made through Other Transaction (OT) agreements.
Submission of a solution summary is mandatory, and only selected teams will be invited to submit a full proposal in the subsequent pitch process.
Key Dates
- Proposers’ Day: July 13, 2026
- Solution Summary Due: August 12, 2026, at 12:00 PM ET
- Full Proposal Due: Anticipated Fall 2026 (invitation only, details to come)
ARPA-H notes that dates are subject to change, and proposers should reference the official solicitation for the most current information.
A New Era for Sleep Medicine
REST reflects ARPA-H’s belief that advances in biosensing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and noninvasive intervention technologies have created a unique opportunity to redefine sleep medicine. By enabling objective measurement of sleep quality in home environments and developing systems capable of improving sleep in real time, the program aims to create a new foundation for diagnosing and treating insomnia.
For organizations working across sleep technology, digital health, medical devices, wearables, neuroscience, and AI-enabled healthcare, REST represents an opportunity to contribute to what could become one of the most ambitious sleep health initiatives undertaken by the federal government.
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