by Max Moebus, Christian Holz
Understanding a person’s perceived quality of sleep is an important problem, but hard due to its poor definition and high intra- as well as inter-individual variation. In the short term, sleep quality has an established impact on cognitive function during the following day as well as on fatigue. In the long term, good quality sleep is essential for mental and physical health and contributes to quality of life. Despite the need to better understand sleep quality as an early indicator for sleep disorders, perceived sleep quality has been rarely modeled for multiple consecutive days using biosignals. In this paper, we present novel insights on the association of cardiac activity and perceived sleep quality using an interpretable modeling approach utilizing the publicly available intensive-longitudinal study M2Sleep. Our method takes as input signals from commodity wearable devices, including motion and blood volume pulses. Despite processing only simple and clearly interpretable features, we achieve an accuracy of up to 70% with an AUC of 0.76 and reduce the error by up to 36% compared to related work. We further argue that collected biosignals and sleep quality labels should be normalized per-participant to enable a medically insightful analysis. Coupled with explainable models, this allows for the interpretations of effects on perceived sleep quality. Analysis revealed that besides higher skin temperature and sufficient sleep duration, especially higher average heart rate while awake and lower minimal activity of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system while asleep increased the chances of higher sleep quality.