Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia in the United States. Sleep is one of the lifestyle-related factors that has been shown critical for optimal cognitive function in old age. However, there is a lack of research studying the association between sleep and AD incidence. A major bottleneck for conducting such research is that the traditional way to acquire sleep information is time-consuming, inefficient, non-scalable, and limited to patients' subjective experience. A gold standard dataset is created from manual annotation of 570 randomly sampled clinical note documents from the adSLEEP, a corpus of 192,000 de-identified clinical notes of 7,266 AD patients retrieved from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). We developed a rule-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm, machine learning models, and Large Language Model(LLM)-based NLP algorithms to automate the extraction of sleep-related concepts, including snoring, napping, sleep problem, bad sleep quality, daytime sleepiness, night wakings, and sleep duration, from the gold standard dataset. Rule-based NLP algorithm achieved the best performance of F1 across all sleep-related concepts. In terms of Positive Predictive Value (PPV), rule-based NLP algorithm achieved 1.00 for daytime sleepiness and sleep duration, machine learning models: 0.95 and for napping, 0.86 for bad sleep quality and 0.90 for snoring; and LLAMA2 with finetuning achieved PPV of 0.93 for Night Wakings, 0.89 for sleep problem, and 1.00 for sleep duration. The results show that the rule-based NLP algorithm consistently achieved the best performance for all sleep concepts. This study focused on the clinical notes of patients with AD, but could be extended to general sleep information extraction for other diseases.

Around 40 percent of accidents related to driving on highways in India occur due to the driver falling asleep behind the steering wheel. Several types of research are ongoing to detect driver drowsiness but they suffer from the complexity and cost of the models. In this paper, SleepyWheels a revolutionary method that uses a lightweight neural network in conjunction with facial landmark identification is proposed to identify driver fatigue in real time. SleepyWheels is successful in a wide range of test scenarios, including the lack of facial characteristics while covering the eye or mouth, the drivers varying skin tones, camera placements, and observational angles. It can work well when emulated to real time systems. SleepyWheels utilized EfficientNetV2 and a facial landmark detector for identifying drowsiness detection. The model is trained on a specially created dataset on driver sleepiness and it achieves an accuracy of 97 percent. The model is lightweight hence it can be further deployed as a mobile application for various platforms.

Brief fragments of sleep shorter than 15 s are defined as microsleep episodes (MSEs), often subjectively perceived as sleepiness. Their main characteristic is a slowing in frequency in the electroencephalogram (EEG), similar to stage N1 sleep. The maintenance of wakefulness test (MWT) is often used to assess vigilance. Scoring of the MWT in most sleep-wake centers is limited to classical definition of sleep (30-s epochs), and MSEs are mostly not considered in the absence of established scoring criteria defining MSEs but also because of the laborious work. We aimed for automatic detection of MSEs with machine learning, i.e. with deep learning based on raw EEG and EOG data as input. We analyzed MWT data of 76 patients. Experts visually scored wakefulness, and according to recently developed scoring criteria MSEs, microsleep episode candidates (MSEc), and episodes of drowsiness (ED). We implemented segmentation algorithms based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and a combination of a CNN with a long-short term memory (LSTM) network. Data of 53 patients were used for training of the classifiers, 12 for validation and 11 for testing. Our algorithms showed a good performance close to human experts. The detection was very good for wakefulness and MSEs and poor for MSEc and ED, similar to the low inter-expert reliability for these borderline segments. We performed a visualization of the internal representation of the data by the artificial neuronal network performing best using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). Visualization revealed that MSEs and wakefulness were mostly separable, though not entirely, and MSEc and ED largely intersected with the two main classes. We provide a proof of principle that it is feasible to reliably detect MSEs with deep neuronal networks based on raw EEG and EOG data with a performance close to that of human experts.

An evening meal and drinks out can help you sleep better and feel more refreshed, but going for brunch has the opposite effect and makes you more tired, study finds. Researchers from the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, studied the behaviour and sleepiness of 641 working adults in Sweden, particularly on weekends and days off. Sleepiness can impair cognitive ability, motivation, and behavior including on our desire to socialise with others, according to the team led by Benjamin Holding. The relationship between social activity and subsequent sleepiness and sleep duration was complex and depended on the time of day, the team found. Going out for brunch can make you more sleepy in the afternoon and sleep less at night, going out for dinner can make you more refreshed and sleep better.

Motivated by the attention mechanism of the human visual system and recent developments in the field of machine translation, we introduce our attention-based and recurrent sequence to sequence autoencoders for fully unsupervised representation learning from audio files. In particular, we test the efficacy of our novel approach on the task of speech-based sleepiness recognition. We evaluate the learnt representations from both autoencoders, and then conduct an early fusion to ascertain possible complementarity between them. In our frameworks, we first extract Mel-spectrograms from raw audio files. Second, we train recurrent autoencoders on these spectrograms which are considered as time-dependent frequency vectors. Afterwards, we extract the activations of specific fully connected layers of the autoencoders which represent the learnt features of spectrograms for the corresponding audio instances. Finally, we train support vector regressors on these representations to obtain the predictions. On the development partition of the data, we achieve Spearman's correlation coefficients of .324, .283, and .320 with the targets on the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale by utilising attention and non-attention autoencoders, and the fusion of both autoencoders' representations, respectively. In the same order, we achieve .311, .359, and .367 Spearman's correlation coefficients on the test data, indicating the suitability of our proposed fusion strategy.