Artificial Intelligence Could Help Curb Sleep Disorders

Artificial intelligence has already proved its potential in diverse areas, with performing tedious, mundane tasks in a complex environment, enabling businesses to drive efficiency and more. Today's routine lives are totally impacted by the technology as it provides people a different capability to do their works. AI even offers healthcare professionals the ability to perform crucial treatment with ease. Now the technology could be leveraged to improve efficiencies and precision in sleep disorder treatment, resulting in more improved care and better patient outcomes, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's (AASM) new position statement.

Developed by AASM's Artificial Intelligence in Sleep Medicine Committee and published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, the position statement noted that the electrophysiological data collected during polysomnography – the most comprehensive study on sleep – is well-positioned for enhanced analysis with AI and machine learning.

According to the lead author and committee Chair Dr. Cathy Goldstein, associate professor of sleep medicine and neurology at the University of Michigan, "when we typically think of AI in sleep medicine, the obvious use case is for the scoring of sleep and associated events." This would streamline the processes of sleep laboratories and free up sleep technologist time for direct patient care, she said.

As sleep centers glean large amounts of data, AI and Machine Learning could advance sleep care. These technologies are able to create more precise diagnoses, prediction of disease and treatment prognosis, classification of disease subtypes, accuracy in sleep scoring, and optimization and personalization of sleep treatments. In this regard, AI could be leveraged to automate sleep scoring while spotting new information from sleep data, Goldstein added.

The integration of AI into the sleep medicine practice relies on transparency and disclosure, testing on novel data, and laboratory integration.

This is not the first time any group of academics has taken AI into consideration to help curb sleep disorders. In 2018, Stanford University researchers found that a neural network could identify sleep issues more precisely than a human clinician.

Considering industry reports, over a third of American adults are not getting enough sleep on a regular basis. 50 to 70 million US adults have a sleep disorder, including sleep apnea, insomnia, sleep deprivation, narcolepsy, and circadian rhythm disorders, the American Sleep Association report found. These conditions often decrease work productivity, increase mortality, and poorer quality of life.

Furthermore, several sleep technology companies around the world have now jumped into this field developing new programs that will one day bring AI into the mainstream of sleep clinics. Nox Medical, an Iceland-based sleep technology company, for instance, developed a branch in 2015 called Nox Research that focuses on building AI tools to automate sleep study scoring and extract new insights from sleep study data. Since the program began, the company has released an AI-enabled automatic sleep detector as part of its sleep analysis software Noxturnal.