Pierrick Arnal, PhD: The Dreem Headband Versus Polysomnography

“The sleep staging is used to characterize the architecture of sleep. It gives you the fragmentations, so if you suffer from sleep apnea or if you have insomnia, we can characterize which sleep stage [its occurring in] during the night.”

Recently, the findings of a joint clinical study (NCT03725943) suggested that the Dreem headband device, a reduced-montage dry-electroencephalographic (EEG) device, can monitor sleep-related physiological signals and process them into sleep stages accurately compared to the gold standard of polysomnography rated by 5 experts, which may help pave the way for larger scale, longitudinal sleep studies.

In total, the headband reported a mean percentage error in EEG signals for the monitoring of alpha (α), beta (β), delta (λ), and theta (θ) frequencies during sleep of 15% (±3.5), 16% (±4.3), 16% (±6.1), and 10% (± 1.4), respectively. Similarly, the mean absolute error for heart rate was 1.2 bpm (±0.5), for breathing frequency was 0.3 cpm (±0.2), and for respiration rate variability (RRV) was 3.2% (±0.6). Its 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.

To find out more about the assessment of the device and its potential for more widespread use in clinical study and evaluation of sleep, NeurologyLive spoke with study author Pierrick J. Arnal, PhD, vice president, science and medical, Dreem.

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.