What Wrist Temperature Tells Us When We Sleep Late: A New Perspective of Sleep Health

Abstract

Research has shown that sleep is tied to our internal circadian rhythms and a long-term of misalignment between sleep and circadian rhythms can have harmful effects. Being able to detect circadian patterns is a key component to understanding and supporting a person’s sleep. Wrist temperature has been shown to be correlated to circadian rhythm as well as sleep/wake status. In this paper, we explore the use of wrist temperature to evaluate sleep health of 14 participants over 111 days. Our results demonstrate that our sleep detection algorithm based on wrist temperature can be used to reliably estimate individual’s daily sleep parameters and can be used to support sleep-based phase assessments. A wrist temperature trend-based assessment is also presented to identify when sleep time is misaligned with circadian rythm. This work provides the first steps in future sleep systems that take into account our internal bio-rhythms.