Pierrick Arnal, PhD: Conducting Sleep Studies With the Dreem Headband

“In general, you have to set up the full system and it takes you 45 minutes on average. The patient has to come to lab, and it’s not their own environment so they’re kind of disturbed or stressed, et cetera. For me, the real and unique way to measure sleep has to be at home in your own environment.”

For a large part of scientific history, sleep has been notoriously difficult to measure, and as it has mostly required individuals to come to a sleep lab and be assessed (and equipped) with complex systems. Recently, the findings of a joint clinical study (NCT03725943) suggested that Dreem’s headband device can monitor sleep-related physiological signals and process them into sleep stages accurately compared to the gold standard of polysomnography.

The reduced-montage dry-electroencephalographic (EEG) device offers patients the ability to have their sleep assessed in the comfort of their home environment, which Pierrick Arnal, PhD, believes will offer a better opportunity to accurately examine patients. In the study, the device’s automatic sleep staging achieved an overall accuracy of 83.5% (±6.4; F1 score: 83.8 [±6.3]), compared with 86.4% (±8.0; F1 score: 86.3 [±7.4]) for the 5 sleep experts scoring the polysomnography.

In a conversation with NeurologyLive, Arnal, who is the vice president of science and medical at Dreem, also spoke to how the device might be used to record brain activity during the day as well, due to the ease of wearing it.

REFERENCE

Arnal PJ, Thorey V, Debellemaniere E, et al. The Dreem Headband compared to polysomnography for electroencephalographic signal acquisition and sleep staging. Sleep. zsaa097. doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsaa097.