Unattended In-home Sleep Recording: A Pilot Study

Laboratory studies have found that insufficient sleep duration and impaired sleep quality are associated with disease risk, including obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The limitation to the laboratory studies is that they are conducted in artificial environments that do not reflect real-world behavior. Although the epidemiologic studies do reflect habitual behavior, the vast majority of them rely on self-reported measures of sleep, which are only moderately correlated with objective measures of sleep.. The next logical step in the examination of sleep's role in cardiometabolic health is to conduct objective, detailed measures of sleep in people's homes. This project is a pilot study that will develop ideal methodologies for recording sleep in the home environment. Because there is currently is a gap between laboratory models of sleep loss and real world conditions, the ultimate goal of this research is to expand our work on sleep and cardiometabolic health outside of the laboratory. Given the strong evidence for a link between impaired and insufficient sleep and increased disease risk, it is critical that we understand how people sleep in their daily lives and what factors can impact sleep. This project will record sleep in people's homes using ambulatory polysomnography recordings and wrist actigraphy.