Sleep stage prediction with raw acceleration and photoplethysmography heart rate data derived from a consumer wearable device

Wearable, multisensor, consumer devices that estimate sleep are now commonplace, but the algorithms used by these devices to score sleep are not open source, and the raw sensor data is rarely accessible for external use. As a result, these devices are limited in their usefulness for clinical and research applications, despite holding much promise. We used a mobile application of our own creation to collect raw acceleration data and heart rate from the Apple Watch worn by participants undergoing polysomnography, as well as during the ambulatory period preceding in lab testing. Using this data, we compared the contributions of multiple features (motion, local standard deviation in heart rate, and “clock proxy”) to performance across several classifiers. Best performance was achieved using neural nets, though the differences across classifiers were generally small. For sleep-wake classification, our method scored 90% of epochs correctly, with 59.6% of true wake epochs (specificity) and 93% of true sleep epochs (sensitivity) scored correctly. Accuracy for differentiating wake, NREM sleep, and REM sleep was approximately 72% when all features were used. We generalized our results by testing the models trained on Apple Watch data using data from the Multi-ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), and found that we were able to predict sleep with performance comparable to testing on our own dataset. This study demonstrates, for the first time, the ability to analyze raw acceleration and heart rate data from a ubiquitous wearable device with accepted, disclosed mathematical methods to improve accuracy of sleep and sleep stage prediction.