Sleep trackers

Thought I would elaborate a bit on my earlier comment. Initially I did a lot of reading up on this area (during my brainwashed period in 2014 when I thought doctors were on top of sorting me out with GET and sleep hygiene might help). At the time I thought sleep was reasonably understood but now I don’t think that.

Looking at the research to date, I think the main issue we have is that sleep has historically been positioned as an area for psychology and neurology..as a result the research is weak (Mostly armchair musings and low-power poorly controlled studies).

Any new studies have to carry a load of bad-science baggage with them in terms of literature etc. Until we have better science it’s difficult to study other areas around it (like ME). I would prefer the field were spread a bit wider to that of biochemistry, molecular biology, endocrinology and neuroscience fields and they ditch the behavioural stuff which is definitely holding the research back.

The other challenge is that there are so many variables to contend with and it’s difficult to prove anything other than loose correlations that could be red herrings. A bit like trying to prove added sugar in the diet gives you obesity and therefore type 2 diabetes etc. It’s just a correlation ...you could link the same to McDonald’s special sauce or how many calories eaten in one sitting, how much people snack between meals etc. The correlation may be true or it could be completely off-track, or it could be part of a combination of things. Just applying logical common sense to observations and correlations can lead you off down a complete blind alley. And if you don’t isolate and test ..then ....

Similarly there could be many correlations that may or may not have a bearing on the mechanics or links to poor sleep (if we knew what that meant). At the moment it’s parked into the general patient blaming area of too much blue light and stimulation before bed time to explain why people generally get a little less sleep than they used to. The correlations with heart disease and diabetes etc are also all too familiar and are over stretching the credible IMO. And that’s if you consider 10 minutes less sleep over a generation or two significant which I think is highly debatable. Equally you could argue that more people work in less manual energy-expending jobs than they used to or that the graham Norton show is on too late to explain the few minutes less sleep people get.

All this means that the “what normal looks like” reference is suspect, so any study will need to pick carefully through the existing body of research to find any understanding or meaning to reference. Fitbit clearly fails to do this and spouts a load of mindfulness Nonsense for good measure.

I think picking a couple of things to monitor might give clues. However, if we don’t truly understand sleep or the brain and we don’t truly understand ME, it feels like this is a bit like relying on luck/finding a needle in a haystack/searching for a ‘eureka moment’. If we luck out and find something then who’s to say it’s not just a random correlation? What would we then do with the information when we don’t really know the context of what we are looking at?

perhaps my earlier comment was more concise?

 

A Consumer Sleep Tracker Researchers Can Actually Use
https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/body-work/a-consumer-sleep-tracker-researchers-can-actually-use

research paper:
Sleep stage prediction with raw acceleration and photoplethysmography heart rate data derived from a consumer wearable device
https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/42/12/zsz180/5549536