By HISANORI FUJIMOTO/ Staff Writer
January 9, 2025 at 08:00 JST
This weighted sleeping mask product was developed jointly by FLH Inc. and Yamagata University. (Provided by FLH Inc.)
Good news for those who find it hard to catch 40 winks on the go.
A Tokyo-based startup, working with the Yamagata University Sleep Management Research Center, perfected what it calls the gravity weighted sleep mask.
A clinical study that involved students at the university showed how the mask gives wearers a deep but short sleep, officials said.
It is sold by FLH Inc., the business venture, under the product name “Nelax: Power Nap for Dream.”
Nelax is a portmanteau that combines “ne-,” the stem for the Japanese verb for “to sleep,” and the English word “relax.”
The product is also labeled in Japanese as a “weighted sleeping mask.”
Norio Kajiwara, the 46-year-old head of the limited liability company in the capital’s Shinjuku Ward wanted to come up with a product that had a calming effect on users.
His idea was to apply moderate weight on areas around the wearer’s eyes. The mask contains fine grains of glass beads so the weight is applied evenly on the areas around the eyes.
The mask weighs 300 grams.
The clinical study, conducted at the Yamagata University Sleep Management Research Center from April through May, involved 10 test subjects, including students.
The subjects were asked to take naps with a conventional sleeping mask and with the weighted sleeping mask as well as without any sleeping mask on different dates, during which time their brain waves were measured.
The study found that non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, which is deeper, accounted for longer portions of the time when the subjects were wearing the weighted sleeping mask.
“We found that the weighted sleeping mask correlates more strongly with the deepness of sleep than sleeping masks of other types,” said Yasuki Yamauchi, a Yamagata University Faculty of Engineering professor who studies sleep issues.
“Busy people will find it useful as an auxiliary tool for taking a nap during their free time,” Kajiwara said.
Priced at 8,800 yen ($58), including tax, Nelax can be purchased on the product website at https://hirunegao.jp/pages/nelux (in Japanese only).
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