Filling The Sleep Health Gap: Advancing Patient-Centric Research With DHTs

By Lindsey Snyder, Ph.D.

Sleep quality is pivotal for overall health, recognized alongside nutrition and exercise as crucial for population health (AASM, CDC). Unfortunately, millions suffer from sleep disorders annually, impacting the quality of life across various chronic conditions. However, obtaining accurate, reliable, and longitudinal sleep measures remains challenging with standard tools like polysomnography (PSG) and sleep diaries, each with inherent limitations.

Wearable digital health technologies (DHTs) have been pivotal in clinical research for decades, offering passive, objective, and continuous data collection on participants' sleep habits in their natural environments. This data enhances our understanding of sleep health, particularly in assessing patient functioning and quality of life in drug development and clinical research settings. The Digital Medicine Society’s DATAcc initiative underscores this by launching resources for Core Digital Measures of Sleep.

Exploring how advancements in DHTs can bridge gaps in sleep health, our Digital Health Monthly webinar series delves into practical considerations for collecting digital sleep measures and reviews the latest capabilities of wearable DHTs in capturing data for sleep staging.