Sleepy watch: towards predicting daytime sleepiness based on body temperature

Abstract

Daytime sleepiness, the difficulty to maintain an alert waking state during the day, is a serious problem causing vehicle accidents and adverse effects on well-being, health, and productivity. Our research aims at predicting daytime sleepiness using wearable sensing in everyday life to raise awareness and help people to manage their energy better. This study presents a first exploration of comparing body temperature (wrist, forehead, in-ear) with users alertness, measured over a reaction test: Psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) in 7 participants over 2 days in real-life conditions (168 hours in total). The results indicate a weak correlation between some body temperature measures and the PVT scores for certain subjects. This underlines that unobtrusive on-body temperature sensing can be an interesting modality to understand and explore daytime sleepiness.