Study on the objective assessment of sleep disturbance due to environmental noise by wearable devices

Abstract

Introducing noise standards or limits at night is necessary to prevent sleep disturbance due to environmental noise, such as transportation noise. In general, noise standards should be based on robust exposure-response relationships derived from many human response data, and subjective evaluation obtained from large-scale socio-acoustic surveys can provide reliable scientific evidence. However, it is also necessary to investigate an easy method to collect objective data on sleep effects with little cost and effort. In the present study, we conducted a laboratory study and investigated how accurately wearable devices can estimate the sleep stage. Participants wore a smartwatch installed with photoplethysmography (PPG), a portable ECG, and equipment of PSG simultaneously. As a result, the agreement of the sleep stage between the estimations by PPG and by PSG was moderate (kappa coefficient = 0.47). Furthermore, we estimated the sleep stage by random forest using the data measured by the ECG, and it was highly agreed with the sleep stage by the PSG (kappa coefficient = 0.75). It is suggested that we could easily estimate the sleep stages such as waking, REM, and non-REM with a certain level of accuracy by these wearable devices.