Actimetry in infant sleep research: an approach to facilitate comparability

摘要

Study ObjectivesOnly standardized objective assessments reliably capture the large variability of sleep behavior in infancy, which is the most pronounced throughout the human lifespan. This is important for clinical practice as well as basic research. Actimetry is a cost-efficient method to objectively estimate infant sleep/wake behavior from limb movements. Nevertheless, the standardization of actimetry-based sleep/wake measures is limited by two factors: the use of different computational approaches and the bias towards measuring only nighttime sleep—neglecting ~20 % of sleep infants obtain during daytime. Thus, we evaluate the comparability of two commonly used actimetry algorithms in infants and propose adjustments to increase comparability.