Comparative analysis of actigraphy performance in healthy young subjects

Abstract

Sleep-related health disorders are increasing worldwide; diagnosis and treatment of such sleep diseases are commonly invasive and sometimes unpractical or expensive. Actigraphy has been recently introduced as a tool for the study of sleep and circadian disorders; however, there are several devices that claim to be useful for research and have not been thoroughly tested. This comparative study provides activity, sleep and temperature information regarding several of the most commonly used actigraphers: Micro-Mini Motion Logger; Act Trust; Misfit Flash; Fitbit Flex & Thermochron.Twenty-two healthy young subjects were assessed with five different commercial actigraphs (Micro-Mini Motionlogger Watch, Condor Act Trust, MisFit Flash and Fitbit Flex) and a temperature recorder (Thermochron), and also completed a sleep diary for a week. There were not significant differences in the analysis of rest-activity pattern between devices. Temperature rhythm comparison between the Act Trust and the Thermochron showed significant differences in rhythm percentage (p<0.05) and mesor (p<0.0563) but not in amplitude or acrophase.Although data accessibility and ease of use was very different for the diverse devices, there were no significant differences for sleep onset, total sleep time and sleep efficiency recordings, where applicable. In conclusion, depending on the type of study and analysis desired (as well as cost and compliance of use), we propose some relative advantages for the different actigraphy/temperature recording devices.

Actigraphy-based evaluation of sleep quality and physical activity in individuals with spinal cord injury

“…Some available actigraphs also record different type of light sources and body temperature, contributing to a better estimation of sleep and circadian rhythms. In addition, they allow for long-term sleep monitoring over several weeks or months [8]. Validation studies of actigraphic monitoring over 3 weeks in clinical and nonclinical populations concluded that actigraphy is a useful and valid means for estimating total sleep time and wakefulness after sleep onset with an overall participant-specific accuracy above 80% [9].…”

A Systematic Literature Review of the Factors that Influence the Accuracy of Consumer Wearable Health Device Data

“…The unnatural setting and the need for a sleep technologist to set up PSG equipment make its use impractical in a home setting. Consumer wearable sleep monitoring sensors, called actigraphy, is a non-invasive wrist-worn device that comes with accelerometer, heart rate, and respiratory monitor to detect and record the movements of the wearer at regular intervals in order to estimate sleep and wakefulness [13,22,23,30,31].…”

CoRhythMo: A Computational Framework for Modeling Biobehavioral Rhythms from Mobile and Wearable Data Streams

“…Commercial devices such as Fitbits are now able to infer sleep duration and quality reasonably accurately. Two brief studies with healthy young adults have used activity data from Fitbit devices to quantify rest-activity rhythms and found that rhythm measurement compared well relative to research-grade actigraphy [10,11]. Studies in [12] and [13] have also explored the capability of personal tracking devices to measure sleep compared to gold standards such as polysomnography.…”