Abstract—The monitoring of sleep by quantifying sleeping
time and quality is pivotal in many preventive health care
scenarios. A substantial amount of wearable sensing products
have been introduced to the market for just this reason, detecting
whether the user is either sleeping or awake. Assessing these
devices for their accuracy in estimating sleep is a daunting task,
as their hardware design tends to be different and many are
closed-source systems that have not been clinically tested. In
this paper, we present a challenging benchmark dataset from
an open source wrist-worn data logger that contains relatively
high-frequent (100Hz) 3D inertial data from 42 sleep lab patients,
along with their data from clinical polysomnography. We analyse
this dataset with two traditional approaches for detecting sleep
and wake states and propose a new algorithm specifically for 3D
acceleration data, which operates on a principle of Estimation
of Stationary Sleep-segments (ESS). Results show that all three
methods generally over-estimate for sleep, with our method
performing slightly better (almost 79% overall median accuracy)
than the traditional activity count-based methods.
An illustration of timeseries data from a wrist-worn 3D accelerometer
(top) and polysomnography, suggesting that there is strong correlation between
sleep-wake phases (middle) and amount of activity (bottom). This paper
presents a benchmarking dataset to evaluate and reproduce results for such
algorithmic approaches to detect sleep and wake phases from accelerometer
data, and proposes a novel algorithm that is compared with 2 traditional ones
Timeseries of the data abstraction steps performed in this study, to
compare methods that detect sleep-wake phases based on 3D acceleration. The
raw accelerometer data (top) is first treated with a band-pass filter (middle, in
red), after which method-specific features, called activity counts, are computed
per epoch (bottom, in black) to detect the sleep and wake phases.