Measuring Real-World Sleep With Actigraphy: Three Clinical Trial Use Cases

Disturbed or impaired sleep has been the subject of increased research attention in recent years, both as a primary disorder and in cases where disturbed sleep is a symptom of another disease. Disturbed sleep is common in patients with arthritis, atopic dermatitis, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and many other conditions. Research is focused on measuring and diagnosing these sleep disorders, as well as the development of new treatments to improve sleep across a broad range of indications. Wearable devices provide a low-burden and remote approach to objectively quantify people’s sleep in their real life, often revealing meaningful insights that might not be available with polysomnography or self report data. While sleep architecture and sleep staging are difficult to estimate with accelerometry alone, actigraphy is sensitive to treatment effects in previous studies of sleep disorders.