Periodic variations of natural weak extremely low frequency electromagnetic field (ELF-EMF) along with illumination can serve for entrainment of circadian rhythms. It seems promising to use the non-pharmacological remote physiotherapy exposure to ELF-EMF for the correction of sleep disorders and the normalization of circadian rhythms of sleep.
The aim of our study was to assess the impact of weak ELFMF on different characteristics of night sleep, estimated by subjective assessment of sleep quality.
In our experiments, an ELF-EMF generator “Smart Sleep” formed rectangular current pulses supplied to the magnetic field emitter. The device has 7 modes of pulse frequency: 2, 4, 8, 16, 20, 32, 40 Hz. At a distance of 70–200 cm from the device field intensity was less than 0.2 µT, which is significantly less than the permissible hygienic standards. 20 healthy volunteers (both sexes, aged 20–30) took part in the study and self-assessed the night’s sleep: sleep quality, sleep latency, wellbeing on awakening, sleep fragmentation, quality of dreams, emotions in dreams, dreams’ memorability, awareness in dreams. The Kruskall-Wallis single-factor rank analysis was used. Significant improvements under ELF-EMF influence were found: p < 0,05 for the: wellbeing on awakening (4 Hz, 20 Hz), sleep fragmentation (8 Hz) and latency (20 Hz), the dream memorability (4 Hz), quality (2 Hz, 16 Hz), emotions (8 Hz) and awareness (20 Hz); p < 0,01 for the: sleep latency (32 Hz), the dream memorability (2 Hz), quality (4Hz) and emotions (2 Hz).