A sleep staging model based on core body temperature rhythm

Abstract

Core body temperature (CBT) rhythm and sleep process are closely intertwined, yet there is a lack of quantitative methods to link them. To accomplish the research link of “sleeping thermal environment - body temperature - sleep quality” and also to establish a new sleep staging methodology, sleep staging models based on random forest algorithm were constructed. These models fulfilled the requirement of distinguishing four sleep stages (Waking stage, REM stage, Light sleep and Deep sleep) based on the CBT rhythm. The database utilized for model construction emanated from a winter sleep experiment, wherein seven male and seven female participants underwent a consecutive three-night testing protocol within laboratory settings. Data analysis results confirmed that (1) For the separately constructed sleep staging models for males and females, their accuracies stood at 0.70 and 0.77, respectively. The overall performance of the female model marginally surpassed that of the male model; (2) The predominant error in existing models arisen from misjudgments of adjacent sleep stages, such as misclassifying REM stage and deep sleep as light sleep, and this phenomenon may arise from the individual difference in CBT distribution; (3) Personalized sleep staging models have promising prospects, with their peak accuracy reaching an impressive 95% - nearly approaching the performance of gold standard polysomnography (PSG). In summary, this study elucidates the inherent quantitative connection between CBT rhythm and sleep stages, and the proposed sleep staging model has practical value.