Monitoring Daytime Napping in Community Dwelling Older Adults Using Contactless Sleep Technologies

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundIncreased daytime napping and excessive sleepiness are associated with cognitive decline in older adults, especially in people living with dementia (PLWD) [1]. Subjective assessments of naps are burdensome and maybe unreliable in PLWD and hence there is a need for technologies that provide objective longitudinal assessment of the incidence and duration of naps. Here we compare two contactless sleep technologies (CSTs) against sleep diary and actigraphy for monitoring daytime napping in community dwelling non‐demented older adults.MethodTwo under‐mattress CSTs (Withings Sleep Analyser [WSA] and Emfit QS [Emfit]) along with actigraphy (Actiwatch Spectrum [AWS]) were deployed in the home of 17 older adults for a period of 14 days ( = 65 years; Mean Age ± SD = 72 ± 4.49; 6 Women). The ground truth nap information was collected using an extended consensus sleep diary that included additional information about naps (timing, duration, and location). We analyzed the agreement of the napping events and duration estimated by WSA, Emfit and AWS against the sleep diary reported events.ResultThe CSTs only detected in‐bed naps whilst the AWS detected both in‐bed and not‐in‐bed naps. Although all the compared devices detected spurious naps unreported in the sleep diary, it was highest in AWS (81% of total naps detected) followed by Emfit (63%) and WSA (16%) as shown in Figure 1. Among the CSTs, WSA accurately detected more in bed naps while registering less spurious naps compared to Emfit but had lower duration agreement to sleep diary (Figure 2). Further, when the contribution of daytime naps to 24‐h total sleep time was computed, the WSA estimate (12.8±6.1%) was closest to the sleep diary estimate (12.9±9.1%) followed by AWS (15.6±9.9%) and Emfit (17.2±11.1%).ConclusionCSTs, with their ability to provide both contextual location information and objective measures of napping, such as timing and duration, offer a reliable and unobtrusive alternative to traditional methods such as sleep diary and actigraphy for long‐term round‐the‐clock monitoring of sleep in older adults.