Can Wearable Technology Improve Your Sleep? – By Nancy Foldvary-Schaefer, D.O. and Colleen Lance, M.D. (US News) / March 3 2020
In general, these technologies can help remove barriers between your home and local sleep lab.
The key to getting a good night’s sleep may not be in your bedroom, but on your smartphone or wearable fitness device.
Lack of sleep can affect your daily life – whether it’s at school or work, in personal relationships or regarding your health and safety. Untreated sleep problems can cause various health conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.
Sleep apps, fitness devices and online programs have become a popular way to help combat sleep issues. We’ve seen exponential growth in home-based monitoring technologies, particularly in consumer wearables (devices you wear) and nearables (devices that monitor from your nightstand, mattress or nearby). Many find that these tools can provide feedback and instruction that helps them get some shut eye. The information the technology provides can help you track your slumber and detect patterns that enable you to target areas for improvement.
In addition, these devices provide a broad view of the larger population’s sleep habits. For instance, the Fitbit longitudinal sleep database released information based on millions of nights their users logged in 2017. The data offered a glimpse of sleep behavior including average bedtimes, wake times and total hours slept. The average Fitbit user slumbered six hours and 38 minutes per night, a bit short of what sleep experts recommend. Interestingly, bedtime was inversely correlated with age. But while Generation Z went to bed the latest, they slept longer, putting their nightly average of total hours asleep on top. Baby Boomers slept the least, averaging six hours and 33 minutes per night.
Traditionally, sleep specialists have relied on more standard tests done in a clinical setting to measure sleep and diagnose sleep disorders. The gold standard is polysomnography, also called a sleep study, which records extensive data from surface sensors while you slumber in a sleep lab. Home sleep testing is a more limited study that looks solely at sleep apnea, although these devices often miss mild forms of the disease. Actigraphy is a medical grade accelerometer that has been used for decades to quantify total sleep and determine sleep wake patterns. The concept behind the use of an accelerometer is that activity correlates with wakefulness, while lack of motion correlates with sleep.
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