The European Sleep Research Society (ESRS) recently published an interview between the two Sleep Revolution researchers Prof. Dr. Walter McNicholas, the previous European Sleep Research Society President and Dr. Timo Leppänen, an associate professor at the University of Eastern Finland. 

The interview covers various important topics related to technology in sleep research. They adress the common scepticism  towards automated analysis and discuss the potentials of automated analysis as well as the limitations of these technologies. 

Watch the interview here: 

The Sleep Revolution General Assembly is a yearly physical meeting for all participants in the Sleep Revolution project. This year the General Assembly was held in Reykjavik, Iceland May 22^nd and 23^rd. The General Assembly was held after the Nordic Sleep Conference which was held in Reykjavik May 18^th until 20^th. It was very convenient for our participants to combine both events in Iceland.

The first day of the General Assembly was used to give an update about every Work Package (WP) by the WP leaders and discuss general project management and developments. There were good discussions between the participants and plenty of room to ask questions and share ideas. There was also discussion about organizing more Focus Groups and the idea was presented about forming a Collaboration Group to further stimulate and enhance collaboration and exchange of scientific ideas and knowledge within our project.

On the second day workshops were offered to prepare the upcoming ESADA studies that 24 centers are taking part in, as devices are being prepared to ship and patient trials are set to begin once all ethical approvals are in. All participants got the opportunity to attend those workshops during our General Assembly where all procedures where explained. Furthermore, all participants discussed project progress and shared ideas about the future of the Sleep Revolution.

We thank everyone for participating in the 2023 General Assembly in Iceland! 

The ESRS is responsible for Work Package 12: Standardisation and Dissemination. This involves facilitating the co-ordination and dissemination of findings from the many research projects carried out by the Sleep Revolution consortium. This will be achieved by presentations at the bi-annual congress of ESRS, which is attended by about 2,000 participants, and by publications in the society journal, the Journal of Sleep Research, which is one of the highest impact sleep journals worldwide. Work Package 12 will also include the employment of a research methodologist by ESRS, funded by Sleep Revolution, whose role will be to facilitate systematic reviews and meta-analyses of existing publications relating to relevant topics for the project. This work will help clarify the existing evidence base for relevant research topics and to identify relevant topics for further research.

Find more information about Sleep Revolution within European Sleep Research Society here.

Researchers from the University of Madeira and different research institutes in Iceland, Finland and Spain developed an alternative view for sleep stability analysis. They evaluate sleep stability by creating an index based on the CAP A-phase characteristics, the A-Phase Index. 

The A-Phase Index is estimated with the use of machine learning. The researchers combine multiple artificial neural networks to assess the A-phase subtypes, their API, and the CAP cycles and rate. Their results show that this methodology is suitable to produce a fully automatic CAP scoring algorithm. Furthermore, a sleep stability profile can be acquired by studying when the A-phases occur and how long they last.

” This allows the visualization of sleep instability oscillations during the night and to observe when the brain creates periods of sustained stable sleep.”

The paper is published in SLEEP. You can read the full paper called “API: an Alternative View for Sleep Stability Analysis based on Automatic Detection of the A-Phases from the Cyclic Alternating Pattern” here.