Feasibility of wearable devices and machine learning for sleep classification in children with Rett syndrome: A pilot study

Abstract

Sleep is vital to many processes involved in the well-being and health of children; however, it is estimated that 80% of children with Rett syndrome suffer from sleep disorders. Caregiver reports and questionnaires, which are the current method of studying sleep, are prone to observer bias and missed information. Polysomnography is considered the gold standard for sleep analysis but is labor and cost-intensive and limits the frequency of data collection for sleep disorder studies. Wearable digital health technologies, such as actigraphy devices, have shown potential and feasibility as a method for sleep analysis in Rett syndrome, but have not been validated against polysomnography. Furthermore, the collected accelerometer data has limitations due to the rigidity, periodic limb movement, and involuntary muscle contractions prevalent in Rett syndrome. Heart rate and electrodermal activity, along with other physiological signals, have been linked to sleep stages and can be utilized with machine learning to provide better resistance to noise and false positives than actigraphy. This research aims to address the gap in Rett syndrome sleep analysis by comparing the performance of a machine learning model utilizing both accelerometer data and physiological data features to the gold-standard polysomnography for sleep analysis in Rett syndrome. Our analytical validation pilot study ( n = 7) found that using physiological and accelerometer features, our machine learning models can differentiate between awake, non-rapid eye movement sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep in Rett syndrome children with an accuracy of 85.1% when using an individual model. Additionally, this work demonstrates that it is feasible to use digital health technologies in Rett syndrome, even at a young age, without data loss or interference from repetitive movements that are characteristic of Rett syndrome.