Few of us make money by losing sleep.But three graduate students at Brown University in Providence built a company around sleep deprivation  . Jason Donahue, Ben Rubin and Eric Shashoua were working late nights in Brown's business and engineering schools.They began thinking about ways to sleep better.They discovered they weren't alone in burning the midnight oil.Around 20% of Americans get less than six hours of rest a night. The friends imagined a smart alarm clock that could track how much time people spend in the most restorative   stages of the sleep cycle: REM (rapid eye movement) and deep sleep.What would it cost to design such a thing? Five years of research, 20 employees, $14 million and a whole lot of doubting from investors and scientists. Their company, Zeo, based in Newton, Mass, launched its product in June, 2009.The Zeo device uses a headband with tiny sensors   that scan your brain for signs of four sleep states- REM, light, deep and waking sleep.The smart alarm clock displays a graph of your sleep pattern and wakes you as you're not in REM sleep (which is when you're least groggy).In the morning you can upload the data to the company's Web site, and so track your sleep over time.Most of the feedback comes in the form of Zeo's ZQ score showing how well you've slept. "Zeo allows people to unlock this black box of sleep," says Dave Dickinson, a health-care CEO. Whether any of this actually improves sleep is up to the consumer, who will also need to make lifestyle changes like cutting out alcohol before bedtime or caffeine after 3 pm. For now the company is selling Zeo online only.Dickinson also plans to spread it to countries such as Australia, where sleep deprivation approaches US levels. To design the Zeo device, the three graduate students   _  .
spent much time and money were widely supported by scientists worked by themselves all the time attracted many investors