| Description |
Despite clear and plentiful research that sleeping less than seven hours per night has a wide array of health consequences, a large portion of American adults report sleeping less than seven hours per night and thus receive chronic insufficient sleep. Many studies exploring the consequences of insufficient sleep are restricted to small sample sizes and short recording times due to a significant cost to gold-standard polysomnography in terms of expense, time, and reliance on trained sleep technicians to prepare and monitor subjects. Additionally, most studies adopt a design of interventional sleep restriction on otherwise healthy sleepers, which excludes people who receive long term insufficient sleep over months to years. Here, we attempt to explore possible solutions to these issues through the use of a sleep extension study using the Dreem headband, a wireless dry electrode consumer electroencephalography (EEG) device, to measure overall sleep metrics and EEG data. When compared to wrist-mounted actigraphy, the Dreem indicates little systemic skew for data over 75% quality (as assigned by Dreem), but reports significant random error with limits of agreement starting approximately 70 minutes off of actigraphy baseline. Exploration of sleep metrics in baseline insufficient sleep vs interventional sleep extension revealed an increase in total sleep time; increase in all recorded sleep stages; and no significant changes in sleep onset latency, wakefulness after sleep onset, or sleep efficiency. Although several limitations of producing high quality data were identified, the Dreem headband shows promise as a home environment sleep research device. With an improvement in data iii quality the Dreem, or another wireless consumer sleep device, has the potential to help advance the sleep field in ways that have traditionally proven inaccessible. |
