The Future of Sleep Health

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The importance of sleep: Sleep has a profound impact on the quality of life and overall health of an individual. Sleep disorders affect a large percentage of the population and are an under-recognized problem. It is estimated that sleep related problems affect 50-70 million Americans. According to Frost and Sullivan, some of the impacts of sleep deprivation are: • Untreated obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) results in US$87 billion lost productivity each year; • Drowsy driving causes nearly 30% of auto crashes and 6,400 fatalities a year in the United States; • Cost of treating well known comorbidities in undiagnosed OSA population at least US$30 billion. The same report also suggests that the market size for monitoring and management of formal sleep disorders via medical and clinical grade wearables is expected to be a $5 billion opportunity in 2020. One of the key growth opportunities identified was Sleep Data Analytics - providing accurate diagnostic functionality and/or identifying actionable interventions when using potentially lower quality data in often poorly controlled home environments can be a significant challenge. Sleep technology is moving towards smaller, less obstructive devices that are more portable and enable at-home testing. The sleep hardware eco-system also tends to be personalised which means data from multiple, disparate sensors often needs to be integrated and analysed. The impact of poor sleep: In addition to long term risks of OSA, the immediate daytime consequences are neuropsychological impairments such as excessive daytime sleepiness, loss of attention, and impairment of memory and executive functions. Despite the importance of neuropsychological measures, currently there is still a lack of efficient and objective tools to measure them in clinical practice. At present, sleep physicians depend on surrogate clinical measures and subjective analysis to evaluate the neuropsychological aspects of OSA. These measures include interviews with patients, questionnaires (e.g. Epworth sleepiness scale) and assessment of sleep latency, defined as the time required for falling asleep. It provides an indirect quantitative measure of “sleepiness” but requires specialised equipment and several hours of expert care. Tests such as the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) can also be used to assess different facets of neuropsychological impairment, but these tests are time consuming, can be expensive, and may not be suitable for the elderly or people with disabilities. The technology - Key features include: • Capture of critical daytime neuropsychological impairment indications; • Applicability to measure neuropsychological impairment risk in professionals in high-performance jobs. UQ researchers have developed technology for measuring neuropsychological impairments using electroencephalography (EEG) and other data acquired during standard sleep diagnostic tests. The techniques are ideally suited for implementation in the home or work environment using simple hardware. For example, the researchers used a 2-channel left-right EEG asynchrony and successfully predicted two-class PVT performance achieved a sensitivity of 81% and a specificity of 74%. These results indicate that EEG asynchrony during sleep carries information on daytime neuropsychological impairments in OSA subjects. This technology is also applicable to a broader population (outside of a sleep apnea patient population), such as professionals that require high neuropsychological performance for their job - typically jet pilots, truck drivers, surgeons and athletes. This technology will be able to assess whether their job performance will be affected by their previous night’s sleep.