Measuring Sleep by Wrist Actigraph

摘要

Future warfare may be exceptionally intense and brief, offering personnel little time for sleep. Fatigue could be a crucial factor in combat performance, especially if troops are airlifted across time zones and subjected to jet lag. Therefore, monitoring sleep loss and facilitating adequate sleep are crucial aspects of military medical planning. To monitor sleep in field conditions, a new technology is needed. People move constantly when awake but little when asleep. Electronic recognition of activity can thus be used to monitor and determine sleep/wake states. This Final Report summarizes the research and development of a wearable sleep monitoring system. Wrist activity is measured with a piezo-ceramic transducer, monitored and stored by a microprocessor, then transferred to a larger computer for automatic sleep scoring. In prospective validation trials, the automatic measurement of sleep by a prototype device correlated r=0.97 with EEG sleep scoring. Full technical specifications are presented for construction of field-deployable sleep monitors which could be worn entirely on the wrist. Deployment of such devices would permit operational objective measurement of sleep loss among our troops.