Actimeter sleep6/26/2023 ![]() Those of greater activity corresponded to light and REM sleep. Further study revealed that periods of least activity reflected deeper sleep. Roenneberg said that it wasn’t clear at first how the inactivity cycles matched up to the patterns of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep typically measured in the lab. They did observe large differences among individuals based on their age and work schedules. The data showed no sex differences in LIDS-derived sleep dynamics, although men move more than women do. Those measures showed that movement patterns reflect sleep cycles and replicate the dynamics seen in the lab. The researchers call the new measure “locomotor inactivity during sleep” (LIDS). “It was flabbergasting how it clarified the structures,” Roenneberg says. The researchers used a simple conversion to measure inactivity (as opposed to activity) on a scale of near zero to 100, with 100 representing total inactivity. Then, they noticed something: by focussing on periods of inactivity during the night, a much clearer cyclical pattern began to emerge. It was hard to discern the cyclical sleep patterns normally seen with other, more complicated devices in the lab. But the patterns of activity during sleep collected using the devices appeared rather messy. In the new study, Roenneberg and colleagues, including Eva Winnebeck, looked to actimeter data collected over more than 20,000 days from 574 subjects, aged 8 to 92 years. The next step was to find a way to collect objective measurements of sleep characteristics on similarly large numbers of people. Roenneberg’s team had been collecting information on sleep duration and quality via questionnaire. The findings are the latest in a larger, ongoing human sleep project, designed to learn more about sleep and its essential role in our lives by collecting sleep data on thousands of people in the real world. The researchers used the actimeters to assess rest/activity cycles not just over the course of the waking day, but also during sleep itself. The gadgets, called actimeters, record data on wrist movement from which one can obtain activity patterns for up to three months. They are akin to commercially available self-trackers used by consumers. The key is a simple, wrist-worn research gadget that can be purchased for as little as $150. We are going to see things nobody has seen before.” You can’t do this over six weeks or six months. “You can’t easily give somebody an EEG to take home and have next to the bed. “There has been practically no possibility of getting detailed sleep structures in a normal life setting over a long period of time,” says Till Roenneberg of LMU Munich in Germany. According to the researchers, the findings represent a major breakthrough in sleep research because, for the first time, it will now be possible to objectively capture the real-life sleep habits and sleep quality of large numbers of people. But now researchers reporting in Current Biology on December 28 have found a way to capture detailed information on human sleep cycles over long periods of time while individuals slumber at home in their usual way. To measure a person’s sleep, researchers have always relied on costly and time-consuming approaches that could only be used in a sleep lab.
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