The Meaning of Sleep Quality: A Survey of Available Technologies

Sleep is an important part of the human daily routine. Restoring sleep is strongly related to a better physical, cognitive, and psychological well-being. By contrast, poor or disordered sleep leads to possible impairments of cognitive and psychological functioning and to a worsened general physical health. In this context, understanding changes in sleep quality becomes a research imperative that leads to the need for the definition of what restoring or quality sleep means. This understanding of what “sleep quality” means requires a cross-domain investigation. It arises the need for a comprehensive study that offers a complete taxonomy of sleep monitoring systems, with a focus on sleep quality, and that gives useful insights about which combination of metrics, signals, and sleep variables is the best in relation to different categories of users. The proposed study is focused on systematically categorizing the methods and approaches for sleep quality understanding, with an emphasis on technological approaches, including wearable, on-bed, and actigraphy devices. It offers a systematic review for researchers who are interested in sleep quality identification tasks, and highlights strengths and weaknesses of state-of-the-art metrics and solutions in order to suggest the best choice for new potential research challenges in the field. Another important outcome of the proposed work is the study of the impact on the identified signal metrics and solutions of the different target user populations with their specific user requirements.