From florian ciorica on 2015/07/25 20:19:36 +0000
I’m using Sleep as Android for more than half a year now (via a Nexus 5 and a LG Watch R) and I’m extremely happy with it. I’ve started using because of my Bruxism which is very loud and frequent.
The main problem right now is that while I can playback in the morning the audio files and see that I was indeed grinding my teeth, there is no simple way of analyzing and correlating the bruxism with other data, like heart rate, quantity of alcohol consumed (and timestamp), cigarettes or other factors. Bruxism monitoring would solve that problem.
Bruxism has a rather high prevalence, between 8% and 10% of adults and it impacts the quality of sleep. I’m pretty sure that the prevalence of Sleep as Android users with bruxism is higher than the average (10%) in general population.
I’ve found a good study from 2013 which talks exactly about the use of smartphones (android) for clinical research into this problem, using mainly the audio files recorded during the night.
Mobile Health Tracking of Sleep Bruxism for Clinical, Research, and Personal Reflection /
A few excerpts from the study:
“In this thesis, we examine the possibility of developing an application for mobile phones to help diagnose and monitor sleep bruxism using three channels: audio, video, and electromyography (EMG). Through the use of the channels, we were able to capture sleep bruxism activity throughout the night. In addition, we found evidence that EMG and audio activity follow similar consistent patterns which may indicate that audio signals may potentially be used in lieu of EMG, reducing invasiveness.”
“Ohayon et al. reported that 23% of the 13,057 participants in their sleep bruxism prevalence study reported the need for dental work due to grinding, 8.1% reported jaw discomfort upon awakening, and 23.3% claimed to grind their teeth loud enough for bedside partners to hear [69]. Not only is the individual with sleep bruxism affected, bedside partner could also experience sleep disruption due to the grinding noises that occur at night.”
“The occurrences of sleep arousals is a response of the sleeping brain to environmental and internal stimuli. Normal sleepers typically experience sleep arousals 6-14 times per hour of sleep. Patients with sleep bruxism have both lower arousal thresholds and experience RMMA activity up to 2-12 times per hour, 3 times more than normal sleepers [9].”
“Giraki et al. assessed the stress parameters of 69 subjects, of which 48 had sleep bruxism, and found that of the parameters investigated (’general strain’, ’emotional strain’, ’social strain’, ’unresolved problems’, ’fatigue’, ’lack of energy’, ’physical problems’, ’success’, ’social recreation’, ’physical relaxation’, ’general content’, and ’sleep’), those with sleep bruxism were significantly correlated with reporting ’daily problems’, ’trouble at work’, ’fatigue’, and ’physical problems’ [32].”
It is a good read and they even include the full details about the smartphones used and software created.
Considering that Sleep as Android already has a very good audio detection of night activity (sound threshold) and also snore recognition, I would like to ask if such a feature (of monitoring bruxism) is hard to implement in the app and if you need any help from the users (like audio files with bruxism samples). I’m sure that a lot of users who suffer from Bruxism would pay for the feature separately from the main app. I know I would.
Ideally, the bruxism tags and timestamps should be exported to sleepcloud and made available to other services, like Google Fit and Zenobase. This way the chance of meaning correlation would increase and hopefully help the people to alleviate their condition.
Let me know if this feature could be implemented and if you need any help from the users.
Thank you!
Copied from original feature request: http://urbandroid.uservoice.com/forums/264867-sleep-as-android/suggestions/9022045-bruxism-monitoring