Sleep tracking about to become a whole lot more accurate, cheaper & easier.
Sleep is vital to a long and healthy life and lack of or broken sleep is a predictor of future health problems like heart disease and dementia. As with all things, knowledge can be power if used correctly. Knowing how well you are sleeping gives you data to do something about the problem early.
World class sleep tracking know as polysomnography (PSG) traditionally needs a cap with dozens of leads attached, a sleep lab in a university and a trained tech. The strange location, intrusive leads and high cost make this cumbersome, less accurate than it should be and the cost is exclusionary.
Now researchers have found similar accurate results to old school polysomnography (PSG) using a single lead electrocardiogram (ECG). This is great news because it is a powerful, non-invasive tool for monitoring the nervous system activity during sleep. Even better news is the research is Open Source, meaning if you could code, you could build your own heart rate based sleep analyser. You can bet that smart wearables using this tech will be coming out in no time.
The ECG based approach using neural network technology and achieves "gold standard levels of agreement with PSG using only ECG data". These results were considerably more accurate than commercial non EEG sleep tracking approaches (E.g. your smart watch). Most non PSG options fail to classify some sleep stages.
The sleep stages are:
Wake, rapid eye movement (REM), Non-REM stages 1-3. Each stage is associated with a particular physiological process such as memory.
Photo by <a href="https://buff.ly/4dTxg5v">Erik-Jan Leusink</a> on <a href="https://buff.ly/4cxNAYn">Unsplash</a>
Original article: https://buff.ly/3yBLV6r