Dr. Matt Walker

And that's when things can get very problematic as well.

But it would require some degree of consenting that if you have a history of suicide ideation in the past, what if you were to be able to consent and say, I would like to risk mitigate, and you have a wearable, like a watch, and that watch is connected to your phone, and there is a signal that can come from your watch that dials a series of phone numbers in order of preference.

And when your watch starts to detect that your sleep has this, and one of the things we really want to understand is what is the specific signature of sleep abnormalities?

It's not just that your sleep gets short, but is it that your sleep gets long and then short and then long and then short, but it constantly has poor quality of sleep and the regularity is all over the place, but the chronotype timing is still in place.

What...

sort of specific pattern of those things is the hallmark that is most predictive of suicide.

Let's say that I can come up with that algorithm finally, and then we can implement it into a watch or a tracking device of some sort.

And when it starts to see that pattern, it's constantly pattern matching.

And it starts to see that across whatever number of days we say, if you see this across six nights or across 13 nights, this is serious.

It then triggers that phone to send a message to those individuals who are the designated support carers.

And those people then reach out and start to say, how are you doing?

Would you like to have a phone call?

Can I come over?

Can I make you some food?

And I'd love to have a chat with you.

Can you find a way to bootstrap a condition where you constantly then otherwise become asocial or antisocial and lose all support network?

So that would be the sort of the grandiose idea.

The other thing that's very interesting is that we could measure the activity and their wakefulness at night.

And the reason I bring this up is some great work by Michael Perlis and Michael Grandner, who've looked at suicide, both attempts and suicide completion across the 24-hour period.

It's not constant.