Sleep Measurements Pre-Collaborative Effort

The Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) has announced a new pre-competitive collaborative project team focused on sleep measurement.

Sleep is an important area for measurement because sleep disturbance has a huge impact on quality of life and is often the first indicator of a larger health issue. Sleep also has been linked to mental health concerns, as well as an economic impact.

The current gold standard for measuring sleep is the sleep lab—an artificial setting that is expensive and reflects very little about a person’s typical night’s sleep. The goal of the project team is to pave the way for better approaches so that sleep data can be collected remotely, from the comfort and routine of one’s own home and bed. There are now new smart tools, outside of the world of wearables, that make measuring sleep easier and remove the usual concerns with adherence. These tools include ambient sensors like those in smart mattresses, sleep mats and smart shirts.

“If every organization interested in sleep measurement continues to select and develop its own measures independently, it will take decades to realize the promise of digital clinical measures to improve lives,” said Pip Griffiths, PhD, DiMe’s Project Lead for the sleep project. “We have a stellar team that has come together to align on a unified digital measure that will fast-track research, development, and solutions to provide care to the individuals that our industry is in place to serve.”

DiMe’s crowdsourced Library of Digital Endpoints currently includes 350+ measures from 100+ organizations. Of these measures, 56 are focused on sleep.

The DiMe project team features representatives from the following organizations: Activinsights Ltd, Bayer, Beacon Biosignals, Biostrap, Boston University, Byteflies, Demiroglu Bilim University, Dreem, Duke University, Eli Lilly, Google, GSK, HumanFirst, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, NextSense, Primasun, Sage Rx, Sleep Number, Softmatter/MAS, Takeda, TNO, and VivoSense.

Sleep is DiMe’s latest digital measure project. Last year, it announced research findings and resources for Nocturnal Scratch and has two additional pre-competitive Digital Measures Development efforts underway in Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias and Physical Activity.