Automatically capturing sleep and social factors to understand ramadan in the real world

Abstract

We live in a fast-paced busy world where one of the key biomedical factors we compensate with is sleep. Sleep impacts many facets of our lives from chronic disorders to workplace productivity, happiness and many other dimensions that we are continually discovering. Advances in technology and health informatics have made it possible to measure and understand sleep and related social factors in the real world. We are specifically interested in understanding sleep before and during the month of Ramadan - a time when people fast from sunrise to sunset. This fast is observed by more than a billion humans yearly and consequently there are some impacts to the society. In this paper we introduce the development of a health information system capable of acquiring, managing and visualizing health data for 1. Sleep signals were acquired by utilizing wireless sensing technology to measure sleep in a naturalistic setting rather than asking users to sleep in a sleep laboratory and 2. Social factors captured from surveys through a web platform rather than utilizing paper surveys. The system was developed to be easy-to-use by users and study administrators. We introduce to our knowledge the first research study, Fasting In Ramadan Research sTudy (FIRST@Masdar), capturing sleep and social factors before and during Ramadan from a total of 40 participants over two consecutive fasting years of 2012 and 2013.