Sleep Monitoring Tools at Home and in the Hospital: Bridging Quantified Self and Clinical Sleep Research

The quantified self movement suggests solutions for diverse long-term measurements, including sleep monitoring. However, those solutions do not seem to meet the challenges facing clinical sleep research. Where efforts in the past to describe design frameworks for sleep monitoring tools focused on the sleeper as user, we start from the sleep clinician to find out how sleep monitoring tools can be meaningful in clinical settings. Based on observations in hospital-based sleep centers performing traditional and ambulatory sleep studies, we describe current practices and look at the effect when measurements leave the hospital. We summarize design recommendations for sleep monitoring tools, suitable in and outside the hospital, from the sleep clinician's perspective. Furthermore, we discuss a future for sleep research where quantified self tools and approaches expand clinical sleep research. This would allow hospital-based sleep centers to deploy current practices in a targeted, meaningful, and accountable way.