Smart Pajamas Monitor Patients With Sleep Disorder

Hugh Pickens writes "Emily Singer reports in MIT Technology Review that a nightshirt embedded with fabric electronics can monitor user's breathing patterns while a small chip worn in a pocket of the shirt processes that data to determine the phase of sleep, such as REM sleep (when we dream), light sleep, or deep sleep. 'It has no adhesive and doesn't need any special setup to wear,' says Matt Bianchi, a sleep neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-inventor of the shirt. 'It's very easy—you just slip it on at night.' Until now people with sleep disorders were hooked up to a complex array of sensors that monitor brain activity, muscle activity, eye movement, and heart and breathing rate but the 'smart pajamas' simplify this by focusing only on respiration. 'It turns out that you can tell if someone is awake or asleep and which stage of sleep they are in purely based on breathing pattern,' says Bianchi. 'That's a much easier signal to analyze than electrical activity from the brain.' Sleep specialists hope the pj's can help patients with insomnia or other sleep disorders since the shirt allows repeated measurements over time in the home so users can log their habits, such as coffee or alcohol intake, exercise, or stress, and look for patterns in how those variables affect their quality of sleep."

Already a fan, but how valid is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being someone who has been diagnosed with narcolepsy, this would have been so much nicer but you can't get nearly as much data. If you want to tell what stage of sleep someone is in, that's fine, but if you want to diagnose someone, you need to test for everything. I was certainly tested for everything even though I knew what I had based on symptoms (such as falling asleep during SATs despite 6 energy drinks, traffic lights, and talking/listening to people).

Data taken from one source isn't enough to test for every diagnosis. It certainly is more convenient that having at least 20 wires attached with a sticky KY substance though. Basically, if people can sleep with that stuff on, you have a sleeping disorder--worst weekend ever...

From TFA, he was saying that it would be an objective way to measure how much sleep one got for people with insomnia or more importantly the quality of sleep, but I feel like that is about all that it is good for.

Re:Already a fan, but how valid is it?

[snookerhog]

While I don't really question the results of my own sleep diagnosis, I certainly question the methods. One nights sleep at the diagnostic center is really just one data point. From a purely statistical perspective, this is already lame. Add to that the stress of having to do the test with a strange bed and all the wires and you would seemingly have a recipe for disaster. Yet somehow, it does kinda work out for some people. I agree that having some sort of cheap, easy home monitoring device that is not decades behind in sensor and transmitter tech would be really nice.