Research from 5 million nights of sleep revealed that sleep trackers can help detect chronic and acute health conditions by analyzing transitions between identified sleep phenotypes, offering a deeper insight into health than traditional sleep metrics alone. Your sleep tracker could provide insights beyond your sleeping patterns—it may also offer clues about chronic conditions like diabetes and sleep apnea, as well as illnesses such as COVID-19 . These insights come from a study that examined data from approximately 5 million nights of sleep from about 33,000 individuals.
The researchers conducting this study have identified five primary sleep phenotypes, which they further categorized into 13 subtypes. The researchers also found that how and how often a person switches between sleep phenotypes could offer two to ten times more information relevant to detecting health conditions compared with just relying on a person’s average sleep phenotype alone. The study was recently published in the journal npj Digital Medicine .
Using data collected from Oura Ring–a smart ring that tracks sleep, skin temperature, and other information–the researchers looked at individual people over a series of months, noting whether they had chronic health conditions such as diabetes and sleep apnea, or illnesses such as COVID-19 and the flu. The research team found that people would often move between sleep phenotypes over time, reflecting a change in an individual’s health conditions, and .
