"My dad, Murray Moffat, is a sleep doctor. In 1982, he opened one of the first independent sleep laboratories in Canada. He became interested in sleep while working as a coroner. When he was called to a site, he would sometimes find a person in bed or on the couch, having died inexplicably in their sleep. It often appeared to be a coronary, but why, he wondered, were so many people having heart attacks in the night?"
"At the time, sleep studies were mostly run in universities and hospitals, and my dad remembers them being performed in the halls of a Toronto psychiatric institute. He decided to set up a facility dedicated to diagnosing and treating sleep disorders."
"As a kid, I imagined my childhood home as its own kind of sleep lab. The bedrooms had blackout blinds and mattresses with just the right firmness. At night, the temperature was a cool sixty-eight degrees. Around the house, there were stacks of the journal Sleep and balls of knotted electrodes that my dad was always repairing for his actual sleep lab."
Murray Moffat, a sleep doctor, opened one of Canada's first independent sleep laboratories in 1982 after becoming intrigued by unexplained deaths occurring during sleep while working as a coroner. He noticed patterns of nighttime heart attacks and questioned why so many people were dying inexplicably in bed. At that time, sleep studies were primarily conducted in universities and hospitals settings. Recognizing a gap in dedicated sleep disorder care, Moffat established a specialized facility focused on diagnosing and treating sleep disorders. His daughter grew up in a home optimized for sleep research, with blackout blinds, controlled temperature, and sleep study equipment, becoming his first laboratory assistant.
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