Fatigue and Sleep Assessment using Digital Sleep Trackers: Insights from a Multi-Device Pilot Study

For the patient community with neurodegenerative disorders (NDD) and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMID), fatigue and sleep disturbances stand out as two of the most common and disabling symptoms, which mightily impair patient's quality of life. Traditional questionnaire-oriented approaches to reflect such symptoms suffer from recall bias and poor sensitivity to change. By virtue of multiple sensing modalities at home, IDEA-FAST project aims to identify novel digital endpoints of fatigue and sleep disturbances, that are objective, reliable and sensitive to change. This article presents and discusses results from a pilot study of IDEA-FAST to evaluate the feasibility of capturing sleep and fatigue measures from three sleep trackers. Data collected from 143 participants (age range: 21–82) across 6 disease groups and healthy cohort for a period of 9 months, were investigated using our proposed sensor analytical pipeline. The overall performance reveals that the median coverage rate of sleep trackers ranged from 48.3% to 76.9%. Furthermore, the digital measures obtained from each device, indicated a higher association with sleep related patient reported outcomes (PROs) than fatigue related ones, when taking all participants into account.