Development of an online sleep diary for physician and patient use

Abstract

This paper describes the development of an electronic sleep diary and outlines its advantages over the traditional paper based approach still used by many sleep centres throughout the world. A sleep diary is a record of sleep details filled in by a patient normally over a period of two weeks. This information is then used by a physician as a diagnostic tool for identify sleep disorders in the patient. The development method used was convergent interviews with sleep specialists in order to establish initial requirements. This was followed by a rapid prototyping approach in order to produce the final specification. This paper concludes that an online sleep diary is a low cost, viable alternative offering benefits to both patients and physicians. The benefits to patients include the ability to perform functional analysis of their own sleep habits (referred to as sleep hygiene) and to determine factors affecting their sleep patterns. This knowledge leads to greater patient understanding of their circumstances and can lead to a potential increase in patient, physician collaboration. The physician gains access to timely accessible patient information as well as to an evidence database that will allow for greater analysis of sleep disorders throughout the general public over time.