back to list

Project: Visual Analytics for Sleep Diary Analysis

Description

This study will provide more insight in sleep and the relation between sleep and air traffic using interactive web-based visualizations. Sleep data will be retrieved from a graphical sleep diary application and air traffic data from an open-source platform.

Every two years, the Gemeentelijke Gezondheidsdienst of Brabant-Zuidoost studies the experiences of residents in the area of Eindhoven Airport with respect to well-being and possible disturbances. These reports indicate an increasing trend in sleep disruption due to air traffic. Humans have the ability to perceive and react to sounds while asleep. Therefore, aviation noise during nighttime can directly cause sleep disturbances. A study by Kim et al. showed a positive correlation between nocturnal noise exposure and sleep disturbance. Immediate effects of of sleep disturbance due to noise include an increasing number of nocturnal awakenings, earlier final awakening or a delayed sleep onset. Sleep disturbance plays a major role in health problems, such as stress, depression and obesity. Air traffic can also indirectly cause sleep problems by causing distress and annoyance due to noise and visible cues during daytime The desire to gain more insight into the effect of air traffic on sleep causes the demand for a sleep measurement method that is able to assess the sleep of a larger population for a longer period of time.

Over the years, many approaches to measure sleep have been developed. This ranges from
EEG measurements to mobile sleep tracking applications. Especially the latter has become highly
popular over the last few years. These applications focus on objective sleep measurements using
motion detection or heart-rate detection using werarables. Additionally, there are also subjective
methods such as interviews used to measure sleep, especially in clinical settings. One of these
methods is a sleep diary. This is a tool used to collect information about the daily sleep-wake
pattern of people using a subjective perception of sleep. People ll out the diary every morning
about the night before. The information gathered by the sleep diary is often used by health
professionals in diagnosing sleep disorders. However, the information that is retrieved from a
sleep diary might not only be useful in clinical settings, but also in identifying sleep-wake patterns
and sleep quality of a larger group of people. The subjective sleep experience reports from sleep
diaries have been shown to be a reliable source of information about changes in sleep patterns
over a longer period of time [6]. A study by Goelema et al. also showed that self-reported sleep
measures are a better predictor of perceived sleep quality than actigraphy-based sleep measures.
To attain a clearer perception of how air traffic affects the sleep quality around Eindhoven Airport, a study is being performed in which a sleep diary application is used to retrieve information about the sleep of residents in the area of Eindhoven Airport. This research will aim to provide more insight into the data from sleep diaries and the relation between sleep and air traffic by means of visualization.

Visualization is a useful technique to help humans make sense of abstract information by graphical
representations of the data. Current approaches are not well suited for analyzing sleep of a larger
population on different time scales. Frequently, paper versions of sleep diaries are used which
requires much effort to calculate sleep parameters and aggregate the data. Furthermore, connecting
sleep and air traffic also demands a lot of work from the user. Therefore, the goal of this study is
to enable users to get a better understanding of the data from sleep diaries through visualization.
It should facilitate the option to explore existing and new sleep parameters and the possibility to
associate sleep parameters with air traffic to get a better understanding of the relation between
them.

Details

Student

AS

Anne Smets

Supervisor

Anna Vilanova

Secondary supervisor

HO

Humberto Garcia and Sebastian Overeem

External location

Kempenhaeghe

Link

Thesis