The asymmetry the authors open with is doing more work than it first appears. Intoxication is punishable at work because it is measurable at the moment of work. Sleepiness has escaped comparable treatment largely because it left no record, even though being tired behind the wheel can be as dangerous as driving drunk [5]. Continuous monitoring removes that difference: it produces a time-stamped account of the night before, which is the evidentiary form any fitness-for-duty rule requires [1].
There is a budget line behind the institutional interest. Insufficient sleep is associated with hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost economic output [13], and in some high-income countries at least a third of adults sleep less than the recommended seven hours [12]. Governments, health systems and insurers are already treating sleep as a public-health lever, and fine-grained monitoring is becoming both cheaper and more socially accepted [9]. An employer that can see the deficit in its own workforce has a rational reason to want it closed.
Measurement on its own supports only the demand to sleep longer, and the authors note that deprivation can follow from policy choices rather than personal habit [15]. Enhancement changes the ask. If technology can deliver wakeful benefits beyond those of a conventional night, then the expectation shifts to sleeping better within whatever hours the schedule leaves, and what counts as healthy rest is redefined along with it [10].
The 2016 Dutch decision is the one tested boundary here, and it is narrower than its reputation. Of the two companies investigated, only one was tracking sleep [7], so the sleep-specific case law is a single employer [16]. The finding also turned on consent rather than on the data: the regulator held that the information was sensitive health data and that employee agreement could not be treated as freely given, given the power imbalance [8]. That distinction decides who has to build the governance. A consumer device vendor discharges much of its duty by obtaining consent; an employer cannot, because a regulator has already ruled that route closed in the employment relationship [17].
The harder question the authors raise is distributive. Access to enhancement and the cost of deprivation may not land on the same people, and the workers least able to decline an offer of better sleep are the ones for whom the offer doubles as surveillance [11]. Insomnia has been treatable by cognitive behavioural therapy or medication for years [15], and neither became a condition of employment. Whether enhancement stays in that category is the thing the three authors want decided while the products are still immature [11].
