New wrist-wear tool helps track your sleeping habits

Scientists say a new device can help answer sleep problems by objectively monitoring actual sleep habits and quality. This utility is called actimeter, which records wrist movement data from which one can get sleep activity patterns for up to three months.

Researchers from Ludwig Maximilian Munich (LMU) University in Germany used a wrist measuring device to assess the cycle of rest / activity not only during the time of waking, but also during sleep time. . These findings are one of the biggest projects of human sleep designed to learn more about sleep and its essential role in our lives by collecting sleep data. of thousands of people in the real world.

Till Roenneberg from LMU Munich said: "This will help many people with sleep problems and hope to increase their appreciation of the importance of sleep to our health and happiness. The researcher collected information on sleep time and quality through the questionnaire, and the next step was to find a way to collect objective measurements of sleep characteristics with a similar number of people . "

In the new study published in Current Biology, the researchers surveyed meter data that operated for more than 20,000 days from 574 subjects, from 8 to 92 years old. However, sleep patterns are collected using the device with a rather messy measurement cycle. It is difficult to distinguish cyclical sleep patterns from other, more complex, laboratory devices.

By focusing on periods of inactivity at night, a clearer sleep pattern begins to appear.

The tool uses a simple converter to measure inactivity (as opposed to activity) over a range of 0 to 100, with 100 samples representing the total number of inactivity. Roenneberg said: "It is extraordinary that this method elucidates the sleep structure. Researchers have called this new method" sleep-inactive "(LIDS).

Roenneberg said: "Many devices have tried to use activity to evaluate sleep structures, but our methods are simple, transparent and work specifically in long-term tracking logs ."

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