Typical methods for dealing with insomnia include white noise generators, soothing music, herbal concoctions, and prescription sleeping pills. Now a Kickstarter campaign is launching a wearable device designed to train insomniacs to fall asleep faster through a counterintuitive approach: It gently wakes them up every three minutes.

Leon Lack, an emeritus professor at Flinders University in Australia, invented the device, called Thim. His team’s research indicates that people can learn to fall asleep more quickly if they repeatedly experience the sensation of falling asleep.

“Thim is based on 10 years of university research which has shown a better way of improving sleep,” Lack said in a statement. “For the first time, our research is being transferred into the home environment through Thim.”

The user wears Thim on a finger when going to bed, and the device vibrates gently every minute until it detects the wearer has fallen asleep. It then waits three minutes before vibrating again to gently awaken the person. Thim repeats this cycle for one hour, after which it lets the wearer sleep undisturbed for the remainder of the night.

Thim’s creators claim the device can determine sleep onset much more accurately than other sleep trackers. With an accompanying smartphone app, Thim can track sleep quality and calculate a sleep score. There’s even a nap mode that ensures the user awakens exactly 10 minutes after falling asleep—the ideal power nap duration, according to the inventors.

Soap opera effect

Is more of a good thing necessarily better? Oscar-winning movie director Ang Lee sure hopes so. Lee shot and exhibited his latest film, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, in a state-of-the-art 120 frames-per-second format. But it left viewers at a New York screening “unsure as to whether this degree of heightened resolution helps or hinders the cinematic experience,” according to tech website New Atlas.

The faster system, which loads more visual information into a second of screen time than the traditional projection rate of 24 frames per second, created problems such as the actors’ makeup being clearly visible and mannerisms coming across as “false and hammy.”

“It’s like watching a high school play,” wrote Variety film editor Brent Lang. —M.C.

Cyber burnout

Measures to improve computer security in an era of increasing cyber threats may be having the opposite effect. Many computer users are becoming reluctant to deal with computer security—a state of mind new research is calling “security fatigue.”

A recent study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology of attitudes and behaviors of typical computer users found that the majority experienced security fatigue, leading to risky online behavior at work and in their personal lives.

The team of computer security experts, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists found that the weariness of being on constant alert and having to make numerous security decisions led computer users to feelings of resignation and loss of control. The danger is that a “fatigued” user may avoid hassle by, for example, using a simple (and easily guessed) password rather than a complex one.

“Years ago, you had one password to keep up with at work,” said Mary Theofanos, a computer scientist and co-author of the study. “Now people are being asked to remember 25 or 30.”

To reduce security fatigue, the researchers recommended organizations limit the number of required security decisions on their websites and keep security options simple. —M.C.