Sleep science takes the stage at Big Data in Precision Health

Speakers at Stanford’s Big Data in Precision Health conference discuss how their work with big data impacts and informs sleep research.

By Hanae Armitage

Sleep is one of the big black boxes of biology. We all know sleep is important and that our bodies need it to function, yet scientists are still in the dark when it comes to understanding how it works.

“This is a really exciting time in data science,” said Minor. “We’re truly covering the gamut of issues related to precision health and biomedicine. In the next few days, we’ll have speakers who will discuss everything from the social determinants of health, to how we can use machine learning and other analytic techniques to improve the drug discovery process.”

Although there’s been quite a bit of evolution in this realm, sleep-monitoring technologies could benefit from some further finessing, Berent said, and in doing so they should prioritize something called a “daytime score.” The benefit of sleeping is to rejuvenate yourself for the next day, but current technologies mostly focus on yielding data from the previous night’s sleep. What could be more useful, said Berent, is a technology that harnesses data to tell users how prepared he or she is for the next day. And Berent said he thinks it will take more than just the monitoring devices themselves to achieve this.

“I think we can get an accurate ‘daytime score’ based on smartphone usage,” he said. “We use our smartphone 50 or 60 times a day, sometimes a lot more than that, and that usage gives us a lot of data to draw statistics from.” For example, there could be correlations between type or text response time and sleepiness. Linking smartphone usage data with sleep, Berent said, will be key for the next generation of sleep wearables.

The app employs tools such as sleep diaries and provides platforms for users to report their own sleep measures. There’s even a sleep coach dubbed “the prof,” a scholarly-looking cartoon with a delightful Scottish accent. The prof acts as a sort of in-app sleep guru, imbued with evidence-based knowledge and tips that help users get better sleep.

Sleep problems are fairly common and vary widely, from sleep apnea and insomnia to restless leg syndrome, narcolepsy, and much more. “But what’s really exciting to me is that sleep is at the center of a revolution of sorts,” he said.

Alongside the development of new hardware and apps that keep tabs on sleep are new machine learning models. Researchers are using these models to analyze sleep quality objectively and to better understand sleep patterns. Mignot said he is particularly excited about the use of genomic and molecular data to better pin down the roots of certain sleep disorders.

For example, Mignot said, analyses showed that many of the genes associated with narcolepsy (which causes extreme sleepiness and bouts of unexpected sleep) are actually involved in the immune system, which led to the knowledge that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease. Outside of genomics, Mignot is hopeful that proteomics, or the study of proteins, will also illuminate new findings in sleep science.

“It’s really incredible because, we can, for example, find proteins that are known to peak in the blood at very specific circadian times,” said Mignot. By measuring hundreds of proteins that are associated with sleep and circadian rhythm, scientists can start to stitch together a clearer understanding of the molecular biology behind sleep cycles.

Now Mignot has teamed up with collaborating sleep labs to conduct a study in which they record sleep data from 30,000 participants.

At the end of the talk, a scientist in the audience stood to ask a question: What does sleep do? What does it accomplish?

“That’s the million dollar question,” said Mignot. “And that’s what we hope to figure out with this study.”

Photos by Rod Searcey, Jonathan Berent shown at top

Related posts:

The 12 Steps was first created in 1935 by Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson, who were part of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement. The recovery program aims to help individuals overcome their addiction and…

What I know about Johnny and Chris — my bosses and the new owners of The Worried Dog, this rundown roadhouse outside of Teesdale — I got from paying attention and keeping my mouth shut. Like I been…

Of all the hills this person chose to die on, it was the 97% consensus on a statement that is bland and has no alarmism in it and was cherry picked from a small subset of the respondents :)