Hello. I working on a sleep project. Sleep is of paramount importance for resetting brain and body function. While newborns tend to sleep most of their day hours, geriatric population often suffers of lack of enough sleep. Most of the people will subjectively complain about their sleep, at least at one point in their life. While life requirements and schedule might play a major aspect in this, other sleep disorders should be ruled out. There is thus a need to use objective measures to better assess sleep quality and quantity. Can anyone please suggest the objective measures of sleep quality?
Hard to tell about! Sometimes week, or very week validity. Or even impossible, because only indirect measures exist!
But here we go (start to assess):
1. From neurological variables first take the amount oft sleep stages, and compare to reference values (corrected for age, and sex). Sleep efficiency is a rough, but easy to realize - one value variable. Further you can compare sleep onset latency, and sleep duration to reference values (acc. to ethnic differences, age, sex, etc.).
2. For autonomous fcts. no standardized indicators!
Mean heart rate, mean body core temperature e.g. may serve as individual reference values when using long term sleep quality recording (days, or weeks) in the individual. Number of awakenings is sometimes useful. Mean energy expenditure (nowadays from HR-assessments given by activity control at the wrist e.g.) is a candidate. Can represent a very good sleep quality identifier, if this variable was measured by indirect calorimetry. Is an optimal identifier, if measured by direct calorimetry (very hard to assess, because you need climatic chamber). Unfortunately respiration (RR, resp. times, VT, minute ventil.), and blood pressure are badly representative of good sleep. Endocrine variables, if available, might help.
3. By the way (not really weak or bad): ask people after awakening about sleep quality.... (means: feeling of recuperation, relaxation, refreshment, alertness, ....)!!
I have a fit bit watch which measures several aspects:
Time asleep/awake, amount of REM sleep, light sleep and deep sleep. Although I have acess to breakdown of nightly, weekly, 30 day and yearly, I can say that I must do my part by shutting down electronics 1 hour before sleeping, staying consistent with a regular time going to bed, exercise, diet, and monitoring caffeine intake. One subjective measure that I use is how do I feel: rested/tired, energy level throughout the day. In addition, my awareness of these factors AND the willingness to do something different to improve the quality of my sleep has become a greater priority. There are no quick fixes with sleep aids.
I hope this is helpful.
Standardized sleep quality questionnaires are available with high sensitivity & specificity to objectively assess the sleep quality; PSQI-Pittsburg sleep quality index; sleep quality questionnaire by Colin Espie. @Hussain Tariq
Sorry, the general recommendation of questionnaires (see answer A. Choudhury) ist not an objective procedure! Answering questions is per definition - a subjective method.
The measurement is depend on your definition of quality of sleep. If is it the sleep parameters then u can use the Actigraph. However, the patient perception about the sleep maybe differ from their sleep measured by objective measurements. Please read my articles to see the interesting result of objective measurement between insomnia and non-insomnia patients.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31016572
Your question of "The Quality of Sleep?", implies a standard against which the sleep measure can be compared and the degree or amount of deviation from this standard. Friedhart's reply above references a few biological/physiological approaches as likely references frameworks and i'm sure our colleagues in the psychological sciences could add other frameworks.....the literature is rich with reference material from which to draw for addressing this question....it takes me back to the many lively discussion which used to consume much of the time at the scientific meeting on sleep research as sleep medicine evolved over the past 40 plus years.....
The current gold standard in sleep research is called polysomnography (PSG) using mainly EEG which produces brain waves that are manually scored by a sleep physician. In our pilot validation study of a novel non-contact sleep sensor we were able to reach 90% of the accuracy of PSG at a fraction of the cost typically connected to a night in a sleep laboratory.
Hi Friedhart Raschke , although I have not used them myself, the Actisleep model of the actigraph accelerometer range may be useful for your project. Link attached below.
https://www.actigraphcorp.com/support/activity-monitors/actisleep/
If polysomnography (see Lukas Krondorfs answer) isn't available to track sleep a simple 1-channel ecg during nighttime sleep may be used to quantify stable and unstable sleep by means of the cardiopulmonary coupling analysis:
Article An Electrocardiogram-Based Technique to Assess Cardiopulmona...
This approach quantifies physiological sleep quality rather than perceived sleep quality.
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