Using New Technologies and Wearables for Characterizing Sleep in Population-based Studies

With the increasing prevalence of commercially available wearable digital devices in sleep medicine, this review aims to address some of the benefits and concerns with using these devices, with a specific focus on population-based studies.

There has been a recent proliferation of sleep-related research studies that are using wearable digital devices, likely due to their relatively low cost and widespread use among consumers. As technology improves, it seems that wearables likely provide sleep information on par with actigraphy, which has been traditionally used in many sleep-related research studies. We also discuss issues unique to wearables, such as accessing data and data privacy, and the potential for decentralized digital research studies.

Wearable devices have the potential to change how we approach population-based sleep research studies, particularly when considering decentralized digital trials.