Department of Computer Science, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, 59812, USA.
Earable Inc., Boulder, CO, 80309, USA.
Sci Rep. 2023 Oct 16;13(1):17515. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-43975-1.
Difficulty falling asleep is one of the typical insomnia symptoms. However, intervention therapies available nowadays, ranging from pharmaceutical to hi-tech tailored solutions, remain ineffective due to their lack of precise real-time sleep tracking, in-time feedback on the therapies, and an ability to keep people asleep during the night. This paper aims to enhance the efficacy of such an intervention by proposing a novel sleep aid system that can sense multiple physiological signals continuously and simultaneously control auditory stimulation to evoke appropriate brain responses for fast sleep promotion. The system, a lightweight, comfortable, and user-friendly headband, employs a comprehensive set of algorithms and dedicated own-designed audio stimuli. Compared to the gold-standard device in 883 sleep studies on 377 subjects, the proposed system achieves (1) a strong correlation (0.89 ± 0.03) between the physiological signals acquired by ours and those from the gold-standard PSG, (2) an 87.8% agreement on automatic sleep scoring with the consensus scored by sleep technicians, and (3) a successful non-pharmacological real-time stimulation to shorten the duration of sleep falling by 24.1 min. Conclusively, our solution exceeds existing ones in promoting fast falling asleep, tracking sleep state accurately, and achieving high social acceptance through a reliable large-scale evaluation.
入睡困难是典型的失眠症状之一。然而，由于缺乏精确的实时睡眠跟踪、治疗效果的及时反馈，以及保持夜间睡眠的能力，目前可用的干预疗法，从药物治疗到高科技定制解决方案，都仍然没有效果。本文旨在通过提出一种新的睡眠辅助系统来提高这种干预的效果，该系统可以连续、同时感知多种生理信号，并控制听觉刺激以引发适当的大脑反应，从而快速促进睡眠。该系统是一个轻便、舒适、用户友好的头带，采用了一套全面的算法和专门设计的音频刺激。与在 377 名受试者的 883 项睡眠研究中作为金标准的设备相比，所提出的系统实现了：（1）通过我们的系统获取的生理信号与金标准 PSG 之间的强相关性（0.89 ± 0.03）；（2）自动睡眠评分与由睡眠技师共识评分的 87.8%的一致性；（3）通过非药物实时刺激成功缩短了 24.1 分钟的睡眠潜伏期。总之，我们的解决方案在促进快速入睡、准确跟踪睡眠状态以及通过可靠的大规模评估实现高社会接受度方面优于现有解决方案。
