JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

As societies being complex, larger population suffer from insomnia. In 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared that sleep disorders should be dealt as a public health epidemic. However, it is hard to provide a just treatment to each insomnia suffer, since various behavioral characteristics influence symptoms of insomnia collectively.

Objective:

Unlike the current diagnosis of insomnia that requires qualitative analysis from the interview results, the classification of individuals with insomnia by using various information modalities from smart bands and deep learning can provide better insight for insomnia treatments.

Methods:

This study, as part of the precision psychiatry initiative, is based on a smart band experiment conducted over six weeks on individuals with insomnia. During the experiment period, a total of 42 participants (male to female = 19 to 23, average age (SD) = 22.00 (2.79)) from a large university wore smart bands 24/7, and three modalities were collected and examined: sleep patterns, daily activities, and personal demographics. We considered the consecutive daily information as a form of images, and learned the latent variables of the images via a convolutional autoencoder (CAE), and clustered and labeled the input images based on the derived features. We then converted consecutive daily information into a sequence of the labels for each subject and finally clustered the people with insomnia based on their predominant labels.

Results:

Our method identified five new insomnia-activity clusters of participants that conventional methods have not recognized, and significant differences in sleep and behavioral characteristics were shown among groups (ANOVA on rank: F(4,37)=2.36, P=.07 for the sleep_min feature; F(4,37)=9.05, P<.001 for sleep_efficiency; F(4,37)=8.16, P<.001 for active_calorie; F(4,37)=6.53, P<.001 for walks; F(4,37)=3.51, P=.02 for stairs). Analyzing the consecutive data through a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) and clustering could reveal intricate connections between insomnia and various everyday activity markers.

Conclusions:

Our research suggests that unsupervised learning allows health practitioners to devise precise and tailored interventions at the level of data-guided user clusters (i.e., precision psychiatry), which could be a novel solution to treating insomnia and other mental disorders.