Assay Of The Dreem Device On Sleep Metrics And An Exploration Of Sleep Staging In Chronic Short Sleepers During Time In Bed Extension

Despite clear research findings showing that sleeping less than seven hours per night has an array of health consequences, over 1 in 3 American adults report sleeping less than seven hours per night. Many studies exploring the consequences of insufficient sleep are restricted to small sample sizes and are of relatively short duration due to a significant cost of gold-standard polysomnography in terms of participant burden, expense, time, and reliance on trained sleep technicians. Additionally, many studies of short sleep duration use a paradigm of experimental sleep restriction on otherwise healthy sleepers, which excludes people who chronically obtain short sleep duration over months to years. Here, we explore possible solutions to these issues by implementing a sleep extension protocol in 14 adults (average age 20.6{+/-}2.5y; +/- SD) with self-reported habitual sleep duration less than 6.5h/night. Participants completed 2 weeks of baseline monitoring (habitual short sleep duration) and then were instructed to increase time in bed to [≥]8h/night for four weeks. Sleep was monitored using wrist-actigraphy and the Dreem 2 headband, a wireless dry electrode consumer electroencephalography (EEG) device. Compared to wrist-actigraphy, the Dreem 2 shows minimal systemic skew for nights with data quality over 75% (as assigned by the Dreem algorithm). However, Bland Altman analysis shows significant random error with limits of agreement approximately +/- 70 minutes between actigraphy and the Dreem. Exploration of sleep metrics from the Dreem 2 during baseline short sleep versus sleep extension revealed an increase in total sleep time; increase in all recorded sleep stages; and no significant changes in sleep onset latency, wakefulness after sleep onset, or sleep efficiency. Although several limitations of producing high quality data were identified, the Dreem 2 headband shows promise as a home environment sleep research device. With an improvement in data quality, the Dreem headband, or another wireless consumer sleep device, has the potential to help advance the sleep field in ways that were previously inaccessible with clinical PSG.