Researchers from Germany have asserted that new technology present in a piece of wrist wear could potentially record real-life sleep habits and patterns that could impart necessary knowledge that would be able to improve the resting hours of many individuals.Ī very small, wrist-worn gadget can be purchased for as little as $150 that can accurately track how deep you're sleeping, your breath patterns and many other discernible factors that accurately imply how effective the sleep you're getting is. Things like stress levels, body temperature, and room temperature play a huge role in this process. Sleep cycles are a very interesting and fickle thing. Why is it so vital to our everyday functions? What happens if we don't get enough of it? Are sleep quality and quantity interchangeable? There is a larger, ongoing human sleep project that is still trying to determine very integral things about sleep that so many are curious about. Many options that are currently available don't give the levels of accuracy that are often sought in such situations. That’s because, during REM sleep, the extremities frequently twitch and those twitches are detected by the actimeters.Since the beginning of sleep studies, the most accurate readings that could be gathered were typically under the express supervision of a doctor. Those of greater activity corresponded to light and REM sleep. Further study revealed that periods of least activity reflected deeper sleep. Roenneberg said that it wasn’t clear at first how the inactivity cycles matched up to the patterns of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep typically measured in the lab. They did observe large differences among individuals based on their age and work schedules. The data showed no sex differences in LIDS-derived sleep dynamics, although men move more than women do. Those measures showed that movement patterns reflect sleep cycles and replicate the dynamics seen in the lab. The researchers call the new measure “locomotor inactivity during sleep” (LIDS). The researchers used a simple conversion to measure inactivity (as opposed to activity) on a scale of near zero to 100, with 100 representing total inactivity. Then, they noticed something: by focussing on periods of inactivity during the night, a much clearer cyclical pattern began to emerge. It was hard to discern the cyclical sleep patterns normally seen with other, more complicated devices in the lab. But the patterns of activity during sleep collected using the devices appeared rather messy. In the new study, Roenneberg and colleagues, including Eva Winnebeck, looked to actimeter data collected over more than 20,000 days from 574 subjects, aged 8 to 92 years. The next step was to find a way to collect objective measurements of sleep characteristics on similarly large numbers of people. Roenneberg’s team had been collecting information on sleep duration and quality via questionnaire. The findings are the latest in a larger, ongoing human sleep project, designed to learn more about sleep and its essential role in our lives by collecting sleep data on thousands of people in the real world. The researchers used the actimeters to assess rest/activity cycles not just over the course of the waking day, but also during sleep itself. The gadgets, called actimeters, record data on wrist movement from which one can obtain activity patterns for up to three months. They are akin to commercially available self-trackers used by consumers. The key is a simple, wrist-worn research gadget that can be purchased for as little as $150. We are going to see things nobody has seen before.” You can’t do this over six weeks or six months. “You can’t easily give somebody an EEG to take home and have next to the bed. “There has been practically no possibility of getting detailed sleep structures in a normal life setting over a long period of time,” said Till Roenneberg of LMU Munich in Germany. The details were published in Current Biology.Īccording to the researchers, the findings represent a major breakthrough in sleep research because, for the first time, it will now be possible to objectively capture the real-life sleep habits and sleep quality of large numbers of people. Sleep studies, which have always been performed in an expensive laboratory setting, could be replaced by a much simpler method that allows subjects to sleep at home.
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