SleepCogni
Building the technical platform behind a clinical-grade paediatric sleep therapy device
SleepCogni was founded in 2013 to help people with insomnia fall asleep. Their handheld device guides users to sleep through progressive vibration cues: at the start, the device vibrates frequently and the user presses a button in response. As they wind down, the cues slow until sleep occurs and the device stops entirely.
A companion hub captures environmental data throughout the night. Together the two devices generate 11 datasets that need to be collected, stored and made accessible to clinicians, patients and researchers.
What began as an adult-focused solution has evolved, through clinical research and a partnership with Sheffield Children's Hospital, into a platform now supporting active NHS trials targeting paediatric insomnia.
The Curve has been the technology partner behind that platform for the last four to five years.
The Problem
Sleep data is genuinely complex.
The science involves circadian rhythms, response timing and environmental variables that interact in ways that are not obvious outside the field. What seems clear to a sleep scientist is not clear to a clinician, a parent or a researcher.
Presenting 11 datasets meaningfully across all three audiences, on a platform that also needs to meet NHS data standards, is a hard problem.
And the product kept changing.
SleepCogni has pivoted continuously since its founding, shifting clinical focus from adults to children as the evidence base developed. The technology needed to absorb that change without accumulating cost or instability at every turn.
The Challenge
No internal technical team With three people in the business, SleepCogni needed a partner who could build, advise and adapt as requirements evolved. Not a supplier. A standing technical resource that understood the science well enough to implement it correctly.
A platform serving three different users
Sleep clinicians, patients and parents, and the SleepCogni admin team all needed different views of the same data. Each group had different access requirements, different levels of technical confidence and different questions they needed the platform to answer.
Cost-effective iteration at every stage
Every technical decision had to be weighed against what an early-stage, pre-revenue business could afford. That shaped not just the pace of development, but the architecture itself.
The Solution
The Curve built and continues to manage the cloud infrastructure and web application at the centre of SleepCogni's platform. Data flows from the devices to AWS and into a three-view platform covering patients, clinicians and administrators. The Curve also advised on product strategy throughout, shaping decisions that reduced cost and kept the platform flexible as the business evolved.
Our Approach
We migrated SleepCogni's infrastructure to Amazon Web Service (AWS) and built out the web application. Then stayed close as the business evolved, delivering continuous small packages of work that kept the platform aligned with their clinical and product requirements.
Starting with a platform build, then staying close
The first project was the full cloud and platform build.
From there the relationship became continuous: small, focused packages of work delivered as SleepCogni's clinical and product requirements evolved.
That ongoing model has allowed the team to iterate quickly and cost-effectively, without the overhead of scoping and resourcing a new project every time something needed to change.
Advising as well as building
When SleepCogni wanted to build a native mobile app, The Curve advised against it.
A web platform would be faster to change and significantly cheaper to maintain while the product was still evolving.
That call has proven right many times over.
Learning the science
Over four to five years, The Curve has developed a working understanding of SleepCogni's clinical domain.
The team can receive a scientific requirement and translate it into working code accurately, without lengthy back-and-forth between the clinical and technical sides.
The Results
An active NHS trial running on the platform: SleepCogni is currently deploying 100 devices across Sheffield Children's Hospital and primary care.
Four years of change absorbed without disruption: The business has shifted clinical focus, iterated the product repeatedly and expanded its technical scope from cloud to firmware, all without a large internal team.
Initial platform build delivered from scratch: Continuously refined as clinical priorities evolved
Cost saved through better decisions: The recommendation to build on web rather than native mobile has avoided significant unnecessary development cost across multiple rounds of clinical iteration.
The platform The Curve has built is the infrastructure making that possible. As the NHS trial progresses and the evidence base strengthens, the partnership provides the technical foundation the business needs to scale.
"We could word-vomit our ideas to The Curve and they would help us make sense of it. Over the years they have really understood the complexities of what we do, including the science, and been able to implement that in the product. They get changes done far quicker than we were expecting and they have become part of the team. For a business of three people, that kind of relationship is everything."