Sleep is one of the key aspects of good health, along with a healthy diet and regular exercise. Computing researchers have recently worked to understand how systems can support nutrition and exercise, but sleep has been relatively under-studied despite its significant health benefits. The right amount of quality sleep can improve both physical and mental health and is associated with a lower risk for heart disease, diabetes, depression, and obesity. However, sleep disorders are often undiagnosed, and many people are unaware of how their activities or environments affect sleep. Ubiquitous computing has the opportunity to help through self-monitoring, awareness, and identification of strategies to promote healthy sleep behaviors.
This interdisciplinary research agenda will involve the design, development, and evaluation of novel ubiquitous computing approaches to support good sleep health and behaviors. This research will combine expertise in human-centered design, computer science, sleep medicine, and nursing. The researchers' previous formative work with target users and sleep experts has informed design requirements for technologies in this field. The work will focus on building on those results through three main activities. First, they will apply machine learning to model sleep patterns based on a person's smartphone usage to unobtrusively sense and predict sleep duration and timing. Then they will employ a human-centered design process to develop and study the feasibility and initial efficacy of two novel software tools to assist individuals in sensing, recording, and visualizing the behavioral (e.g., caffeine use, food intake) and environmental factors (e.g., noisy environment, light levels) that can disrupt their sleep. And then, they will develop and assess the feasibility and initial efficacy of a new technique and tool for assessing, modeling, and visualizing the impact of sleep deprivation on users' reaction time, cognitive functioning, and mood to help them prioritize sleep.
This research will bring into focus the domain of sleep as a new area for human-centered computing research. The design and evaluation of new applications for sleep will further knowledge of how technology can be designed for long-term health tracking and behavior change, and the designs and evaluations move beyond what is currently being addressed in industry. The technical contributions are novel approaches to monitoring sleep and an expansion of knowledge about how technologies can adapt to meet the unique health needs of different users. Finally, the research seeks to unite the fields of sleep research and computing research to develop solutions for better understanding and treating sleep disorders.
This work has the potential to significantly affect the lives of the estimated 40.6 million individuals in the U.S. with sleep disorders or sleep deprivation, which helps address a major public health issue. In addition, the economic cost of sleep deprivation has been estimated to be $63.8 billion per year. The research will have immediate impact by allowing free access to new behavior change technologies developed through this project. In addition, the research will also impact education by using sleep research as a means for attracting women and minorities to computing research and engaging students in interdisciplinary design teams through student projects and directed research groups.
