JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mental Health (MH) disorders can disrupt a person’s sleep resulting in a lower quality of life. Early identification and referral to MH services is a critical need for Active Duty Service Members (ADSM). Wearable technologies like the Fitbit can potentially help address this problem.

Objective:

If Fitbit proves to be an appropriate clinical tool in a military setting, it could provide a potential cost savings, improve clinician access to patient data and create real time treatment options for the greater ADSM population.To assess the relationship between Fitbit sleep data, self-reported mood and environmental contextual factors which may disrupt sleep as a means to determine if the Fitbit device can be used to identify early markers of mental health disorders.

Methods:

TDBThis observational cohort study was conducted at the Madigan Army Medical Center. 17 healthy adults wore a Fitbit Flex for 2 weeks completing a daily self-reported mood and sleep log. Contextual factors were collected with interim and post surveys. Study aims included determining the correlation between Fitbit sleep data and self-reported sleep, number of waking events and self-reported mood and contextual factors of disruptive sleep.

Results:

The Spearman correlation between Fitbit sleep time and self-reported sleep time was moderate (r=0.643, p=0.005). The Spearman correlation between number of waking events and self-reported mood was weak (r=0.354, p=163). Top contextual factors disrupting sleep were “pain”, “noises” and “worries”. A subanalysis of participants reporting “worries” found evidence of potential stress resilience and outliers in waking events.

Conclusions:

Findings contribute valuable evidence on the strength of Fitbit flex as a proxy that is consistent with self-reported sleep data. Mood data alone does not predict number of waking events. Mood and Fitbit data combined with further screening tools may be able to identify markers of underlying mental health disease.