To clarify: suppose I hold an electric toothbrush to my wrist. (I don’t have one to hand right now to test with.) If it feels relaxing, does that suggest this thing is worth looking into more? And separately, if it doesn’t feel like much of anything, does that suggest it’s not? If that’s not a good test, is there another I could do with an electric toothbrush?
Presumably there are some that transition gently but I have no idea how to search for them.
Sounds like “ability to create arbitrary vibration patterns with a high level of precision over vibration intensity” would be a sufficient feature here? Lovense vibrators offer that. And I do know people who use them to help sleep, though idk if it works though the same mechanism.
You can even load patterns on to the device itself and then you don’t need the app to actually use it. But you still might not want to give one to your elderly aunt, for other reasons. I’m not sure if there’s a time limit to loaded patterns.
Caveat: I’m not sure how battery life compares. I think they advertise less than 8 hours, but that probably assumes higher vibration intensity. I think I’d be surprised if they have smaller batteries than the Apollo.
Also caveat: it’s possible their lowest vibration intensity is higher than you’d want? There’s a setting to scale all vibrations down, but I could believe the actual vibrating components are too big to do sufficiently low intensity or something.
If there’s tests you want performed with one feel free to ask, I guess.
it’s been a while since I used an electric toothbrush. My guess is that the head is probably much more intense than the Apollo, but the body might be about right for the lower end (warning: I last used an electronic toothbrush 10 years ago, if they’ve shrunk this might be less true, but you could insulate it). I think if you hate the toothbrush body vibration you’ll probably hate the apollo. If you love it you might want to stick with the toothbrush, or the baby toys, which I’ve now tested and don’t like because they maintain a constant intensity level. I would put the highest odds of success if you like the vibration at first but it gets overstimulating over time.
If you feel meh I think it depends on how well you trust yourself to notice subtle improvements. The Apollo website clearly expects it to take several weeks to notice the benefits, I’m an outlier for loving it immediately.
Re: Lovense.
This would be very cool if it worked, even if it solves neither my elderly aunt problem nor my outside-the-house usage.
How much control does Lovense give you? Low minimum intensity doesn’t worry me that much, I could always insulate it, but the gradual transition is very important to me. I think the standard gap between power levels in vibrators would be too large, it needs to feel smooth.
Nod. I just tried a toothbrush and it didn’t really feel like anything, but indeed I don’t trust myself to notice small effects.
Lovense offers a continuous slider control, but I just checked and it seems like it’s actually 20 different power levels. Holding in my hand I could definitely tell the difference between them especially at the lower end. (As in I could tell when it changed from one to the next, not that you could give me one and I could say which it was.) That’s a lot more than most vibes IME and might be fine, but I’m not confident. I wondered if that was a limitation of the app but a quick look at the protocol suggests not.
And what I thought was the scale-down feature doesn’t seem to work with local control, so I can’t easily test to check that it’s actually a scale-down (rather than a simple maximum, or redistributing the lower levels without adding in-between levels, or something) and in any case it would make it a lot more of a hassle to use.
So this is less promising than I thought at first :(
I wonder if this is why the Apollo is so much more expensive than it seems like it should be? Maybe getting vibration smooth even at very low levels is hard and hasn’t had the demand to justify optimization yet.
To clarify: suppose I hold an electric toothbrush to my wrist. (I don’t have one to hand right now to test with.) If it feels relaxing, does that suggest this thing is worth looking into more? And separately, if it doesn’t feel like much of anything, does that suggest it’s not? If that’s not a good test, is there another I could do with an electric toothbrush?
Sounds like “ability to create arbitrary vibration patterns with a high level of precision over vibration intensity” would be a sufficient feature here? Lovense vibrators offer that. And I do know people who use them to help sleep, though idk if it works though the same mechanism.
You can even load patterns on to the device itself and then you don’t need the app to actually use it. But you still might not want to give one to your elderly aunt, for other reasons. I’m not sure if there’s a time limit to loaded patterns.
Caveat: I’m not sure how battery life compares. I think they advertise less than 8 hours, but that probably assumes higher vibration intensity. I think I’d be surprised if they have smaller batteries than the Apollo.
Also caveat: it’s possible their lowest vibration intensity is higher than you’d want? There’s a setting to scale all vibrations down, but I could believe the actual vibrating components are too big to do sufficiently low intensity or something.
If there’s tests you want performed with one feel free to ask, I guess.
it’s been a while since I used an electric toothbrush. My guess is that the head is probably much more intense than the Apollo, but the body might be about right for the lower end (warning: I last used an electronic toothbrush 10 years ago, if they’ve shrunk this might be less true, but you could insulate it). I think if you hate the toothbrush body vibration you’ll probably hate the apollo. If you love it you might want to stick with the toothbrush, or the baby toys, which I’ve now tested and don’t like because they maintain a constant intensity level. I would put the highest odds of success if you like the vibration at first but it gets overstimulating over time.
If you feel meh I think it depends on how well you trust yourself to notice subtle improvements. The Apollo website clearly expects it to take several weeks to notice the benefits, I’m an outlier for loving it immediately.
Re: Lovense.
This would be very cool if it worked, even if it solves neither my elderly aunt problem nor my outside-the-house usage.
How much control does Lovense give you? Low minimum intensity doesn’t worry me that much, I could always insulate it, but the gradual transition is very important to me. I think the standard gap between power levels in vibrators would be too large, it needs to feel smooth.
Nod. I just tried a toothbrush and it didn’t really feel like anything, but indeed I don’t trust myself to notice small effects.
Lovense offers a continuous slider control, but I just checked and it seems like it’s actually 20 different power levels. Holding in my hand I could definitely tell the difference between them especially at the lower end. (As in I could tell when it changed from one to the next, not that you could give me one and I could say which it was.) That’s a lot more than most vibes IME and might be fine, but I’m not confident. I wondered if that was a limitation of the app but a quick look at the protocol suggests not.
And what I thought was the scale-down feature doesn’t seem to work with local control, so I can’t easily test to check that it’s actually a scale-down (rather than a simple maximum, or redistributing the lower levels without adding in-between levels, or something) and in any case it would make it a lot more of a hassle to use.
So this is less promising than I thought at first :(
Thanks for checking, this was really helpful.
I wonder if this is why the Apollo is so much more expensive than it seems like it should be? Maybe getting vibration smooth even at very low levels is hard and hasn’t had the demand to justify optimization yet.