Sleepio and BodyMedia team up!

21st May 2013 by Rosie Gollancz

Sleep technology Sleepio news

BodyMedia and Sleepio

Improving your sleep with Sleepio just got even easier! If you have a BodyMedia FIT armband, you can now connect it to your Sleepio account and we’ll automatically import your sleep data each day.

The BodyMedia FIT armband device is pretty advanced: its four sensors capture information from your body to track your activity levels during the day and night. The sensors include an “accelerometer” to record movement, a thermometer to gauge surface skin temperature and heat leaving your body along with ‘Galvanic Skin Response’ sensors to measure how much you sweat!

From today, the sleep data collected by the armband can be imported directly into a Sleepio account, meaning that it can be used to fill your daily sleep diaries and personalise the programme to you.

Have a BodyMedia armband? Why not take a tour of Sleepio to see how we could help you improve your sleep, or, if you are an existing Sleepio member, simply sign into your Sleepio account and click on the ‘Tracking devices’ section in your Case File to connect your device!

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Sleepio connects with UP by Jawbone

30th April 2013 by Rosie Gollancz

Sleep technology Sleepio news

Jawbone connects with Sleepio

We are very excited to announce that Sleepio has been chosen as one of just 10 apps worldwide to be integrated with UP by Jawbone™.

For those new to the world of self-monitoring, UP® is a wristband which tracks your movement throughout the day and night, helping you discover how you sleep, move, eat and feel, and how those activities might affect one another.

From today any Sleepio user with an UP band will be able to connect it to their Sleepio account. Your nightly UP band data will then be automatically imported each morning to update your sleep diary, as well as helping tailor and personalise the programme to you. No more daily sleep diaries!

To connect your UP, simply log in to your Sleepio account, select the ‘Tracking devices’ option in your Case File and click the ‘Connect my UP’ button. Once you have followed the on-screen instructions and connected your accounts, your UP sleep data will continue to sync automatically with your Sleepio account each day.

You can choose to disconnect your device at any time and the Sleepio programme will, of course, continue to work just the same for those without a tracking device!

We’re honoured to have been chosen as one of the first to integrate with UP and we look forward to welcoming UP users into the Sleepio community!

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Spring Clock Change 2013

29th March 2013 by Rosie Gollancz

Great British Sleep Survey Sleep news

Spring clock change 2013

Photo credit: RHiNO NEAL

With the end of March rapidly approaching, the UK is preparing itself for the spring clock change and the start of ‘British Summer Time’.

Unfortunately, it looks like it will still be some time until you can dust off your swimming costume, instead the 31st will mark the loss of an hour’s precious sleep.

To add to this, the newest results from the Great British Sleep Survey suggest that you may also have a full week of poor quality sleep to contend with. In fact, the survey of more than 21000 UK adults has recorded an average 8% fall in sleep quality during the week of the spring clock change in previous years [1].

This yearly dip is accompanied by 12% more people suffering low energy, 12% more people with low productivity and 11% more people with disrupted relationships [2-4].

Thankfully this should only mark a temporary blip in the nation’s sleep, with scores to returning to normal levels in the fortnight following the transition to British Summer Time (BST).

Sleepio Expert, Prof Colin Espie says:

“Sudden shifts in clock time force our internal biological clock to re-synchronise, which doesn’t happen straight away, and can take several days. This can affect the quality of our sleep and, as the survey results show, leave us feeling more tired throughout the day.

The good news however, is that once our bodies have had time to acclimatise to the new sleep schedule, the survey data suggest that sleep quality should settle at normal levels once again.”

Thankfully we have the Bank Holiday to recover, so take pleasure in your lie-in on Monday and we hope you enjoy your Easter break!

[1] The average Sleep Score of those completing the survey in the fortnight before the spring clock change in 2010, 2011 and 2012 was 5.17/10, compared to an average of 5.09/10 for those completing it during the week of the clock change, a fall of 7.9%.
[2] Of those who completed the survey in the fortnight before the clock change, 62.4% complained of low energy, compared to 74.8% during the week of the clock change, an increase of 12.4%.
[3] Of those who completed the survey in the fortnight before the clock change, 54.9% complained of lower productivity, compared to 66.5% during the week of the clock change, an increase of 11.5%.
[4] Of those who completed the survey in the fortnight before the clock change, 72.8% complained of disruption to their personal relationships, compared to 83.9% during the week of the clock change, an increase of 11%.

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It’s World Sleep Day 2013!

15th March 2013 by Helena

Sleep news

World Sleep Day 2013

Photo credit: Leo Reynolds

Today is ‘World Sleep Day’, a worldwide celebration of sleep!

Each year since 2008 World Sleep Day has been organised by the World Association of Sleep Medicine (WASM), whose mission it is to wake people up to the importance of sleep. This year, in honour of the big day they are launching a new blog, authored by Professor Teresa Paiva.

The focus of each Sleep Day is chosen by the WASM – so far these have ranged from drowsy driving to general health benefits of sleep. This year the theme focuses on the trouble many older adults have with their sleep and features the tagline “Good sleep, healthy aging”, they say:

If you’re an older adult, good quality sleep is within reach.

It might mean talking with your doctor about your medications, going to bed and waking up earlier because your body’s circadian sleep cycles have shifted, or getting treatment for other conditions that are interfering with your sleep.

Some sleep disorders, such as insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea, are more common in the elderly. But with diagnosis and specialty care, these issues can also be treated and even prevented.

So, “Happy World Sleep Day 2013″. We hope it ends in restful, refreshing sleep!

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Sleepio to pitch at NHS Innovation Expo 2013

13th March 2013 by Helena

Healthcare Sleepio news

NHS Expo Innovator's Den

Follow #NHSExpo for more information about the conference

With this year’s NHS Innovation Expo well underway, we’re thrilled to announce that our team will be presenting Sleepio there tomorrow!

The NHS Expo is a conference that showcases not only the NHS itself but also inspiring developments in healthcare. Therefore, we’re proud to have been selected as one of five finalists in the ‘Digital Innovation’ category.

Being a finalist means that Sleepio’s co-founder Peter Hames will introduce our programme to the audience in the Innovators’ Den (pictured above) tomorrow (Thursday) at 10am – and a panel of judges, Dragon’s Den style…

Give us a shout if you’re at the Expo – we’d love to see you there!

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Sleep and emotional processing

26th February 2013 by Simon Kyle

Sleep science Sleepio Research Bulletin

Photo credit: ‘|’||’| ‘|’[]||{

We all have first-hand experience of poor or restricted sleep and the negative impact it has on how we feel and function the next day. While we are familiar with the subjective impact of sleep loss on our mood and often increased levels of irritability, it is only now that researchers are trying to uncover how the brain processes emotional information after lost sleep.

For example, in 2007 researchers from the University of California, Berkeley used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of sleep-deprived participants whilst they viewed negative arousing images (e.g. car crash scene). Their results showed that emotional regions of the brain (namely the amydalae) became hyperactive relative to a group of participants who were well-rested.

In a recent study, published in PLoS One, Motomura and colleagues extend this work by investigating sleep restriction – a type of sleep loss that we might all commonly encounter on a weekly/monthly basis. The research group from Japan recruited healthy adults and asked them to spend just four hours in bed per night for five days, and then another five days on a regular schedule of 8 hours time in bed per night.

At the end of each of the five day ‘blocks’, participants slept in a sleep lab and, the next day, were asked to passively view faces (happy and fear facial expressions) while having their brain scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants also completed measures of sleepiness, anxiety and mood during the two different five-day blocks (sleep restricted versus normal sleep-time). For most of the nights participants implemented the new sleep time at home and were monitored with an actiwatch device which measures movement (the lack of which is a proxy for sleep).

When implementing the sleep restriction protocol, participants slept for approximately 4.5hrs, compared with approximately 8 hours when implementing the control condition. During these periods of sleep restriction, participants also reported greater feelings of sleepiness and anxiety.

The main findings were that sleeping just 4.5 hrs over the 5 days, led to an increase in brain activity in the left amygdala when viewing fearful face expressions. There was no difference however, in brain activity for viewing of happy face expressions. The amygdala serves an important role in monitoring and detecting threat in the environment; and has been found to be hyper-responsive in a number of psychiatric disorders.

The authors also looked at how emotional brain areas interacted when viewing faces, finding reduced connectivity between two key regions (amygdala and ventral anterior cingulate cortex) when participants were sleep-restricted. Furthermore, the size of this decrease in brain connectivity was related to increased ratings of anxiety (relative to when participants slept in the 8hour condition).

Although the study has some limitation relating to lack of control over sleep in the home environment, the findings shed new light on how relatively normal levels of sleep loss – that many of us impose upon ourselves each week – can alter how the brain processes emotional information.

The authors also note the strong relationship between sleep disturbance and mental health, and suggest that chronic sleep loss may, over time, increase the vulnerability to depressive symptoms and compromised mental health.

Original paper:
Motomura, Y., Kitamura, S., Oba, K., Terasawa, Y., Enomoto, M., et al. (2013). Sleep debt elicits negative emotional reaction through diminished amygdala-anterior cingulate functional connectivity. PLoS ONE, 8(2), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0056578

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Are NHS savings lowering the quality of care?

18th February 2013 by Helena

Healthcare

NHS reform

Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives

The findings of the latest quarterly report on healthcare in the UK raise debate over how changes in the NHS may affect patients.

The report was published by The King’s Fund, who are monitoring the UK healthcare giant as it works hard to create savings of £20 billion whilst maintaining service levels. This overwhelming task remains the responsibility of finance directors in the NHS, each of whom governs the budget of a single service-providing trust.

Of the 143 finance directors currently employed in the NHS, 48 participated in the online survey commissioned by The King’s Fund. The results seem to suggest that finance directors have, over the past quarter, become increasingly pessimistic about the economic future of the trusts they control. In fact, two-thirds of those surveyed expect the financial situation to get worse in the next year.

Even more worrying is the one third of finance directors who felt the quality of care under their jurisdiction had worsened, supporting existing doubts that the reform has the potential to succeed without damaging the quality of service provided by the NHS.

As all of the surveyed directors govern secondary trusts it is only the quality of secondary care that is questioned here. However, this is unlikely to provide much comfort to the hundreds of thousands of people seeking specialist care each year:

Our survey confirms previous evidence that the transferred NHS money is being used to promote the closer integration of care and in specific services (…) that benefit both the NHS and social care systems. But in many cases it is being used to offset general service pressures and councils are finding it much harder to find savings that do not impact on the quality or quantity of care.

Download the full report from The King’s Fund here: TKF (2013). How is the health and social care system performing? Quarterly Monitoring Report February 2013.

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Sleep and the risk of infection

13th February 2013 by Simon Kyle

Sleepio Research Bulletin

Sleep and risk of infection

Photo credit: ghindo

Both total and partial sleep deprivation have previously been associated with immune system suppression, and in particular with changes in measures of cellular immunity.

Research on this subject typically takes place under very tightly controlled conditions, for example in a sleep laboratory, and the implications for real-world disease risk have rarely been examined. One study, published in 2010 by Cohen and colleagues, found that after healthy individuals were exposed to rhinovirus (the main cause of the common cold), those with lower sleep efficiency (reflecting greater levels of wakefulness during the period spent in bed) and shorter total sleep time were more likely to develop upper respiratory infection.

The same research group, led by Aric Prather, continue this line of research in a recent study by looking at how natural variation in sleep impacts the normal antibody response to the common hepatitis B vaccination. The study was published in the August edition of the journal Sleep. The researchers recruited 125 middle-aged adults, who received a standard 3-dose hepatitis B vaccination. Antibody response was measured before the second and third vaccination procedures and, at six months after the final immunization, the level of clinical protection from Hepatitis B infection was determined according to established guidelines. During this time, participants were asked to wear an actiwatch (measuring objective sleep) and to record a daily sleep log, in order to profile sleep quality and pattern,

The authors found a ‘graded response’ between objective sleep duration and antibody response. That is, those who slept, on average, less than 6 hours per night had the lowest antibody response after initial immunization, relative to the 6-7 hour group and the 7-hours plus group. A similar pattern was also observed for clinical protection against hepatitis B infection at six months, with those sleeping less than 6 hours having decreased protection (even after three doses of the vaccine).

The authors speculate that sleep may play an important role in explaining why some people are more susceptible to infection than others. They also highlight the need for further research into immune functioning in those with clinical sleep disorders.

Original paper
Prather, A.A., Hall, M., Fury, J.M., Ross, D.C., Muldoon, M.F., Cohen, S. & Marsland, A.L. (2012). Sleep and antibody response to hepatitis B vaccination. SLEEP, 35(8), 1063-1069.

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Smoking and sleep

18th January 2013 by Simon Kyle

Sleepio Research Bulletin

Smoking and Sleep

Large survey studies suggest that smokers experience, on average, poorer sleep quality relative to non-smokers. Despite this, there are few well-designed studies that have systematically examined sleep profiles of smokers. Nicotine interacts with several neurotransmitters in the brain – notably dopamine – and could potentially have adverse effects on specific sleep stages.

In a recent study, published online in the journal Sleep Medicine, researchers from Germany compared smokers with non-smokers in terms of objective and subjective sleep. The study team recruited individuals who were free from psychiatric or medical illness and asked them to sleep in a sleep laboratory for two nights. The first night served as an adaption night to the new environment. In total, 44 smokers were compared with 44 non-smokers. On average, smokers smoked 21 cigarettes a day and had smoked for 13 years. All participants were monitored with polysomnography and smokers were asked to provide a blood sample prior to sleep, in order to quantify levels of nicotine and cotinine (the metabolite of nicotine).

The main results were that smokers, relative to non-smokers, took (objectively) longer to fall asleep, spent more time in REM sleep, and had more evidence of sleep-breathing events and limb movements during the night (both known to disturb and fragment sleep). Also, higher levels of pre-sleep cotinine and nicotine were associated with less deep sleep. Self-reported sleep quality was also worse in this group relative to non-smokers.

The authors conclude:

“In summary, sleep disturbances, which can affect daytime wellbeing and mood, are frequent among smokers. We detected reduced rating of sleep quality as well as changes in sleep architecture in a population of healthy young smokers, carefully controlled on other sleep-influencing variables.” The study team also suggest that future work should consider how sleep disturbance may be a risk factor for smoking relapse, in those attempting nicotine withdrawal, since sleep is know to be adversely impacted during this period.

Original paper:
Jaehne, A., Unbehaun, T., Feige, B., Lutz, U.C., Batra, A., Riemann, D. (2012). How smoking affects sleep: a polysomnographical analysis. Sleep medicine 13(10), 1286-1292.

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Blue light & nocturnal driving

29th December 2012 by Simon Kyle

Sleepio Research Bulletin

Driving at night

Photo credit: robinfensom

It is well known that driving performance degrades after insufficient sleep as well as during prolonged wakefulness (e.g. during the middle of the night). Countermeasure strategies are recommended to improve alertness (for example, napping, caffeine); however, people often fail to implement such techniques.

In a recent article, published in PLoS One, Jacques Taillard and colleagues tested whether exposing drivers to light during driving would improve nocturnal motorway driving performance. They chose a particular type of light – so-called blue light – which is effective at increasing alertness and performance.

Forty-eight healthy male participants (aged 20-50 years) were recruited to drive 250km on the motorway between the hours of 1 and 5.15am. They did this three times, over three weeks, in the presence of blue light (LEDs placed on the dashboard facing-up towards the driver), a caffeine pill or a placebo (caffeine) pill.

The research team measured the number of inappropriate line crossings (defined as the number of times the car crossed a right or left lateral lane marker). They also assessed the standard deviation of the lateral position – a marker of ‘car weaving’. After the experiment, participants’ slept at home for a further three nights while undergoing actigraphy (objective measurement of sleep based on movement).

Results showed that both blue light and caffeine significantly improved driving performance relative to caffeine placebo, evidencing reduced number of lane crossings and car weaving. Importantly, however, nearly 1/5 of participants complained of eye-related discomfort when driving in the presence of blue light.

Blue light was also shown not to negatively affect sleep recorded after the experiment (a concern because of the ability of blue light to shift circadian rhythms).

Though still preliminary, the authors note “provided it does not dazzle drivers, continuous nocturnal blue light exposure could be used as an in-car countermeasure to fight nocturnal sleepiness at the wheel in both young and middle-aged drivers”.

Original paper:
Taillard, J., Capelli, A., Sagaspe, P., Anund, A., Akerstedt, T., Philip, P. (2012). In-Car Nocturnal Blue Light Exposure Improves Motorway Driving: A Randomized Controlled Trial. PLoS ONE 7(10): e46750. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046750.

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