Week 3: Updates to the methodology

Welcome to the fourth post for this project. In the previous post, I explained my analysis of some content discussed in the beginning of The Science of Sleep: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters. I learned significant information about sleep which is important to know for this project. While I have been continuing to read this book, I have also read “Monitoring and Improving Personalized Sleep Quality from Long-Term Lifelogs” by Wenbin Gan, Minh-Son Dao, and Koji Zettsu. I have also made some important changes to my approach of surveying the subjects in this project. In this post, I will explain my analysis of the paper I have read and will also describe the changes I have made to my methodology. 

“Monitoring and Improving Personalized Sleep Quality from Long-Term Lifelogs” proposes a framework for personalized sleep monitoring by making use of lifelogs. The paper addresses the problem of how it is difficult to track personalized sleep quality in everyday life, and the paper also addresses issues with traditional methods used in sleep research. Clinical sleep studies are expensive and very inaccessible. The paper proposes the use of lifelogs, which are comprehensive records of a person’s daily activities. The framework proposed by the paper uses machine learning to create a personalized sleep quality model by using the lifelogs to create a more holistic picture of sleep than what traditional methods are capable of. Additionally, this framework would be capable of identifying patterns in lifelog data and can therefore predict future disruptions or changes to someone’s sleep quality. 

The research discussed essentially makes general lifestyle a significant factor when analyzing a subject’s sleep quality. This is similar to my own project, as although I will be correlating levels of light pollution to subjects’ reported sleep qualities, I also am accounting for environmental and other general factors that are affecting the subjects’ sleep quality. I will now discuss changes that I have made to the methodology of the project.

Previously, I have been planning on conducting a 3 week program in which the subjects would self report their sleep quality every morning via reporting the times they aimed to fall asleep/wake up at and the times they actually fell asleep/woke up at. However, from the research I have conducted so far, I realized that there are several factors that affect an individual’s sleep quality beyond how much time they slept for, as the time itself only represents quantity. The quality itself is dependent on things such as environment, lifestyle, and behaviors undergone during sleep. I have researched medically developed sleep scales, and I discovered a sleep scale titled Sleep Quality Scale which was developed by Hyergeon Yi, Kyungrim Shin, and Chol Shin. This covers six domains of sleep quality: daytime symptoms, restoration after sleep, problems initiating sleep, problems maintaining sleep, difficulty waking, and sleep satisfaction. I emailed one of the authors in regards to their sleep scale and introduced myself and this project, and asked for permission to use their sleep scale. While I wait for their response, I will be continuing to read relevant parts of The Science of Sleep: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters.

 I will also be making progress on writing a scientific paper, and within the next two weeks I will have sent out a survey to the subjects. If the creators of the Sleep Quality Scale positively respond to my reaching out, then I will begin my surveying. If they respond negatively or do not get back to me within the next two weeks, then I will be using my own sleep scale that I have developed based on my research of human sleep and factors affecting sleep. I will continue to refine this, and I will keep this in case I am unable to borrow the sleep quality scale that was created by Dr. Shin and his teammates. Thank you for reading this post, and I look forward to keeping you updated on the progress being made in this project.