Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is launching an effort to collect high-quality sleep data from children to ultimately allow for easier at-home detection of high-risk sleep disorders using Apple Watch.
Pediatric sleep study beds are in short supply across the country, CHLA said, which limits the amount of data researchers can access on pediatric sleep disorders. Researchers at the hospital sought a solution for a decentralized method of data collection but found none on the market for completing sleep studies at home without specialized equipment.
To collect the data, CHLA is developing the first sleep registry in the country for children using Apple Watch and a new app to collect sleep data at home, the hospital announced Wednesday. CHLA will recruit children aged 5-18 and currently scheduled for an in-person sleep assessment to join the registry.
Children can have sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, insomnia and delayed phase sleep syndrome. Trouble sleeping can lead to academic, behavioral, developmental and social difficulties, weight abnormalities, and other health conditions, according to Stanford Medicine.
Sleep studies are also used to assess anesthetic risk before procedures and to help clinicians evaluate the risk of complications post-surgery, CHLA said in a press release.
CHLA aims to address the negative effects of sleep disorders through an in-house developed app called WISE-HARE, or Wearable Intelligent Sensor Enhancement Home Apnea Risk Evaluation. It worked with graduates from Apple’s Developer Academy in Fortaleza, Brazil, who supported the integration of Apple technologies including HealthKit.
With the app, Apple Watch and standard polysomnography (PSG) sensors, the app collects over 30,000 lines of code from a sleeping child during the course of a standard eight-hour sleep test. CHLA will analyze the data at the institution’s Virtual Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.
The data will help train new machine learning algorithms that detect sleep disorders in children. CHLA’s goal is for the algorithms to be able to detect high-risk sleep disorders at home without the need for specialized equipment.
“It was important that the benefits of our research would be made accessible for all patients. For this to happen, we needed a device that was comfortable to wear, commercially available, and didn’t require special training to operate,” Eugene Kim, M.D., Principal Investigator and Chief of the Division of Pain Medicine in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at CHLA, said in a press release. “Apple Watch is a device that many children and their parents are already familiar with. The latest version met our requirements for a platform that allows us to collect and manage enormous amounts of data efficiently and securely.”
The app will also be made available open-source to researchers.
“The WISE-HARE app has the potential to help alleviate the delays and frustrations caused by the national shortage of pediatric sleep study beds in the coming years,” Emily Gillett, pulmonologist and sleep medicine specialist at CHLA ,said in a statement. “The Sleep Center and Sleep Laboratory at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles were among the first in the country to focus exclusively on sleep disorders in children, so it’s very fitting that our team at CHLA is pioneering this new sleep monitoring technology with the potential to streamline care for pediatric sleep patients.”
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