Through our efforts, the Global Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health will enhance researchers' capacity to analyze accelerometer data for sleep tracking, facilitating extensive studies on sleep patterns. The outcomes of this initiative have the potential to heighten awareness and offer enhanced guidance on the significance of quality sleep. Moreover, the profound understanding of how external elements influence sleep, mood, and behavior will serve as a foundation for crafting personalized interventions and support systems, specifically designed to cater to the distinct requirements of every individual child.
The “Zzzs” you catch each night are crucial for your overall health. Sleep affects everything from your development to cognitive functioning. Even so, research into sleep has proved challenging, due to the lack of naturalistic data capture alongside accurate annotation. If data science could help researchers better analyze wrist-worn accelerometer data for sleep monitoring, sleep experts could more easily conduct large-scale studies of sleep, thus improving the understanding of sleep's importance and function.
Current approaches for annotating sleep data include sleep logs, which are the gold standard for detecting the onset of sleep. However, they are impractical for many participants to use reliably, and fail to capture the nuanced difference between heading to bed and falling asleep (or, conversely, waking up and getting out of bed). Heuristic-based software is another solution that attempts to identify sleep windows, though these rely on human-engineered features of sleep (i.e. arm angle) that vary across individuals and don’t accurately summarize the sleep windows that experts can visually detect from their data. With improved tools to analyze sleep data on a large scale, researchers can explore the relationship between sleep and mood/behavioral difficulties. This knowledge can lead to more targeted interventions and treatment strategies.
Competition host Child Mind Institute (CMI) transforms the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders by giving them the help they need. CMI has become the leading independent nonprofit in children’s mental health by providing gold-standard evidence-based care, delivering educational resources to millions of families each year, training educators in underserved communities, and developing tomorrow’s breakthrough treatments.
Established with a foundational grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), the SNF Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute works to accelerate global collaboration on under-researched areas of children’s mental health and expand worldwide access to culturally appropriate trainings, resources, and treatment. A major goal of the SNF Global Center is to expand innovations in clinical assessment and intervention, to include building, testing, and deploying new technologies to augment mental health care and research, including mobile apps, sensors, and analytical tools.
Your work will improve researchers' ability to analyze accelerometer data for sleep monitoring and enable them to conduct large-scale studies of sleep. Ultimately, the work of this competition could improve awareness and guidance surrounding the importance of sleep. The valuable insights into how environmental factors impact sleep, mood, and behavior can inform the development of personalized interventions and support systems tailored to the unique needs of each child.