Unobtrusive Sleep Monitoring using Smartphones

How we feel is greatly influenced by how well we sleep. Emerging quantified-self apps and wearable devices allow people to measure and keep track of sleep duration, patterns and quality. However, these approaches are intrusive, placing a burden on the users to modify their daily sleep related habits in order to gain sleep data; for example, users have to wear cumbersome devices (e.g., a headband) or inform the app when they go to sleep and wake up. In this paper, we present a radically different approach for measuring sleep duration based on a novel best effort sleep (BES) model. BES infers sleep using smartphones in a completely unobtrusive way – that is, the user is removed from the monitoring process and does not interact with the phone beyond normal user behavior. A sensor-based inference algorithm predicts sleep duration by exploiting a collection of soft hints that tie sleep duration to various smartphone usage patterns (e.g., the time and length of recharge events) and environmental observations (e.g., prolonged silence and darkness). We perform detailed comparisons between two smartphone only approaches that we developed (i.e., BES model and a sleep-with-the-phone approach) and two commercial wearable systems (i.e., the Zeo headband and Jawbone wristband). Results from our one-week 8-person study show that BES can accurately infer sleep duration using a completely “hands off” approach that can cope with the natural variation in users’ sleep routines and environments.