Since 2012 my team develops a research on the interdependence of the built environment and traffic noise as a public health problem. One important outcome of this research was the development of an accurate mobile phone application called 2Loud? to monitor exposure to noise overnight and indoors. 2Loud? has been tested by a community in Melbourne/Victoria. Since sleep disturbance is a major trigger for ill health associated with long-term exposure to traffic noise, in 2014 we are interested in associating the data on noise exposure to data on sleep quality. Because we want to follow the previous track on participatory environmental monitoring, portable equipment is preferred. I have searched the web and found few devices available for monitoring EEG, ECG, motility, etc. I would appreciate if you could bring here your expert advice and/or practical experience.
i feel that the term 'sleep quality' is a much too broad a term to quantify and is subjected to many varying factors, diet, stress levels from work, young children waking up at night for their parent's attention, pets, quality of the bedding, weather, work schedules, etc... are all external factors that have to be taken into account. Perhaps subjects could fill up a form that defines them into various categories; an example, Young Families, Single occupants, Elderly, so on and so forth. Moreover, the type of housing that they live in, suburb and construction. Flight paths of aircraft can also be charted if they fly in the vicinity. From there a chart could be created for various suburbs and thus be compared.
There are some applications that monitor your sleep cycle, perhaps looking in that direction would help, i am not too sure about the accuracy of such applications though.
Cheers
I note that a brief search reveals there are several iTunes apps for monitoring sleep, including some that incorporate a headband or wristband and telemetry to the iPhone. I'd suggest looking at some of these apps to allow a hardware interface for sleep monitoring. Beyond that, normal sleep research outside a sleep laboratory usually involves a voluntary log book that the subject fills out in the morning, and when significant sleep interruption occurs. Consider, also, that poor sleep patterns can be affected by intrinsic medical causes (obesity -> sleep apnea; gastroesophageal reflux; etc.) as well as extrinsic sources from the built environment.
If you're going to look at older patients, you will still have to account for other variables beyond what's mentioned so far. Christopher's find where an ankle band is generally reasonable for infants but you'll find, for instance, that older children, and elderly adults experience frequent tremor-like movement that could easily be misinterpreted as a sleep disturbance (false positive) when it's really benign. About the best method would involve some sort of remote sensing of the EEG to allow pattern matching to various phases of sleep.
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