Understanding Social and Behavioral Factors Affecting Sleep in Healthy Adults

Abstract

Human health is one of the most complex issues when it comes to creating a sustainable community; one that cannot be created without healthy individuals. Sleep has a considerable public health impact and is needed to maintain optimal health and well-being. The influence of social ties on health related behaviors is also a growing research area in public health. This is the first study to capture both sleep and social exposure in a real-world natural setting. In this research, we utilized a sensing platform to quantify an individual's real world social behavior using mobile technology to study its relationship with sleep quality, architecture and duration. Detailed sleep parameters of healthy young adults were measured in their real-home environment using a validated and relatively unobtrusive sleep monitoring device. Social exposure was captured using Bluetooth embedded sensing technology. Other social and behavioral factors including demographics, mood and pre-sleep routine data were collected via surveys. We found that people with higher duration of social exposure had a higher percentage and time spent in slow wave (deep) sleep. The variability in the amount of slow wave and REM sleep was also found to be related to the amount of social exposure on the following day. These results suggest that processes occurring during sleep have an impact on social behavior. This study also brought novel insights in to the effect of demographics and pre-sleep routine on sleep measured in a naturalistic setting. With further improvements in home sleep monitoring and advancements in technology to capture dynamic real-world data, studies run in the ‘wild' will provide key insights into our understanding of how these factors affect our health. This is a critical step in helping us understand and develop a sustainable healthy community.

Date of Award	Jun 2013
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Inas Khayal (Supervisor)