Can wearables help in sleeping

Can wearables help in sleeping

Sleep deprivation will impact your everyday life–whether at school or at work, in personal relationships or in terms of your health and safety. Untreated sleep disorders, such as high blood pressure, heart failure and stroke, may cause different health conditions.

Introduction

Sleep phones, workout devices, and online services have been a common form of helping combat sleep problems. We’ve seen rapid growth in home-based monitoring technology, particularly in consumer wearables (equipment you wear) and neighboring devices (equipment that tracks from your nightstand, mattress or neighboring).

Smart gadgets, including wrist-based displays, are available. Such wearables pledge to count our moves, alert us to travel and offer our sleep insight. Still, would we expect them to reliably calculate our sleep?

What are these Gadgets?

Many wrist-mounted systems are based on an accelerometer that tracks gestures of the wrists. The data obtained from the accelerometer was marked as sleep or wake — how much the wrist turns and how powerful the action is. In certain instances, systems may often mark sleep as light or dark, meaning the sleep is either good or evil. In certain instances, systems may often mark sleep as light or dark, meaning the sleep is either good or evil. Any apps track heart rhythm, as well. Tiny fluctuations in heart rate timing that arise spontaneously in some conditions with a normal heart rhythm may also offer other information regarding sleep level. The breathing is normally very normal during healthy deep sleep and heart rate too.

After gathering data regarding our motions and/or heart rate during sleep, these wrist sensors are transmitted wirelessly to our phone or machine, and software programs interpret it to produce charts and graphs that allow us to “see” our sleep.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Sleep problems are normal also among individuals who have not recently been to the hospital. Population-based surveys regularly assess the insomnia prevalence in the United States at about 30 percent of the adult population. That implies that approximately one in three Americans are having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. The situation is even harder for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Chronic sleep disruptions affect as many as 70 percents of patients with PTSD. Changes in culture during the twenty-first century are also partially to blame. The growing usage of mobile displays often plays a part in cell phones and tablets. It has been found that the form of light produced by the displays stimulates the development of melatonin3, the hormone that helps control sleep-wake cycles.

How do these Gadgets work?

Technology can strip away sleep but technology can help address sleep issues as well. Wearable apps based on a wristband are instruments that may be used by insomnia sufferers and their physicians to better manage and cure many sleep disorders. Such instruments sense action, a test which is called actigraphy by the science community. This technology’s predecessor is the pedometer which is built to count moves. Today, detectors for actigraphy and orientation are integrated into tiny instruments that match on flexible wrist bands like the FitBit4. Many of these tools allow individuals to set sleep goals and provide input on the amount and quality of sleep they have.

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How can they be utilized?

Wearable technology has been utilized by sleep therapists to build apps that can better treat and control sleep disorders in patients. The integration of portable apps and mobile phone-based software offers a versatile method that delivers advantages for a variety of disorders, including PTSD associated sleep issues. Sleep specialists emphasize that the tracking system alone is not necessary to detect a sleep disorder and handle it. Nevertheless, the wearables are a far more effective device in tandem with sleep diaries and application-based coaching. In hospital-based overnight sleep clinics, disorders such as obstructive sleep medicine also need to be treated. With the availability of tracking devices, a patient having sleep disorders can be treated or monitored at home with ease. In this case, he or she will likely be more relaxed as they will in their respective homes.

Additionally, these apps offer a specific view of the sleep patterns of the broader population. The Fitbit quantitative sleep tracker, for example, provided details focused on millions of nights their customers had logged in 2017. The data gave a snapshot of sleep habits that included daily bedtime, wake periods and overall sleeping hours.

What do experts have to say?

Sleep experts have historically focused on more common assessments performed in a hospital environment to assess sleep disturbances and identify sleep disorders. The gold standard is polysomnography, also called a sleep test, which tracks detailed surface sensor data when you’re sleeping in a sleep laboratory. Home sleep monitoring is a more specific analysis aimed specifically at sleep medicine, but such tests frequently neglect the disease’s moderate manifestations. Actigraphy is a medical-grade accelerometer used for decades to measure overall sleep and to determine trends of sleep-wake. The idea behind using an accelerometer is that motion correlates with wakefulness, while lack of action correlates with sleep.

Most have switched to this simple alternative to boost their sleep with the growing proliferation of consumer-facing automated devices designed to quantify sleep. Most users who rely on wearable exercise apps such as the Apple Watch to count steps or calculate the miles they run have slipped on the sleep monitoring feature of the app.

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Advice for users

Wearable tools usually use a motion-sensing accelerometer, close to the actigraphy. In fact, the overall sleep period and the amount of night-time sleep are calculated relatively well by the commercial exercise devices. Even when calculating brief naps throughout the day their precision decreases. We can’t follow very well on light or dark sleep too. And it’s possible that your smartwatch or exercise app will overestimate sleep quality–the percentage of time you’re actually asleep while in bed.

Persons with sleeping problems or disturbances in the sleep cycle can profit from analyzing the data from those tools. The soon-to-be-released with high expectations Scan-Watch is going to be the first watch approved by FDA to identify irregularities in the EKG and sleep medicines.

Performance

The mattress-based systems have so far struggled to perform well in sleep-wake prediction validation trials. New products including ResMed S+ and high-tech Aura are near-bed tools that have been kept up for sleep vs. wake identification invalidity trials.

This year promises to close the divide between market wearables / nearables and the more conventional sleep condition screening testing used. Remote surveillance of patients is gaining traction within major hospital systems. Reimbursement for RPM products approved by FDA is projected to rise by 2020.

These devices will usually help eliminate boundaries between your house and your nearest sleeping lab, offering a clearer picture of how you really sleep (or not) in your own room. Although digital resources do not substitute traditional sleep monitoring, they may be a fairly affordable way to invest more in your overall sleep wellbeing and involve your health care provider.

Future

Healthy sleep will be a profoundly effective, non-pharmaceutical approach to enhance the quality of life and minimize health care expenses for people suffering from serious conditions such as congestive heart failure and type II diabetes. After the discharge of the patients from hospitals, the hospital department can keep track of their sleep schedule via these wearables. Insurance policies will not yet include wearables as long-lasting medical devices and physicians also can not prescribe prescriptions for them. Thankfully all of these products are priced fairly. If electronic apps can support patients unable to sleep in bed is still an unanswered issue.

Conclusion

Getting to bed, sleeping and then immediately having a graph that reveals what we achieved when we were asleep may be almost mystical. Is it just a good night? How far did we sleep? A few phone taps can tell you the facts. A graph will remind us how we spent the last few hours awake with a time split, period in deep sleep and light sleep. We might also get a “rate” average for the night. Unfortunately, there is too much uncertainty in the answers to the above questions.

 Wearables also calculate inactivity as a proxy to approximate sleep. Some sleep monitoring apps can estimate how long you’re really sleeping. You’d have to conduct a scientific sleep test, which tracks brain waves to determine the phases of sleep you’re passing through during the night, with objective details on your sleep patterns. These tests help to treat problems such as sleep apnea and other sleep disturbances.