SleepioTM is a digital mobile phone and web platform that uses techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to improve sleep in people with sleep difficulty. As part of this process, Sleepio captures data about the sleep behaviour of the users that have consented to such data being processed. For neural networks, the scale of the data is an opportunity to train meaningful models translatable to actual clinical practice. In collaboration with Big Health, the therapeutics company that created and utilizes Sleepio, we have analysed data from a random sample of 401,174 sleep diaries and built a neural network to model sleep behaviour and sleep quality of each individual in a personalised manner. We demonstrate that this neural network is more accurate than standard statistical methods in predicting the sleep quality of an individual based on his/her behaviour from the last 10 days. We compare model performance in a wide range of hyperparameter settings representing various scenarios. We further show that the neural network can be used to produce personalised recommendations of what sleep habits users should follow to maximise sleep quality, and show that these recommendations are substantially better than the ones generated by standard methods. We finally show that the neural network can explain the recommendation given to each participant and calculate confidence intervals for each prediction, all of which are essential for clinicians to be able to adopt such a tool in clinical practice.

An app which uses cognitive behavioural therapy techniques to help people overcome insomnia has received recommendation from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). Sleepio, from Big Health, uses an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to provide people with tailored therapy and provides a digital six-week self-help programme involving a sleep test, weekly interactive sessions with users encouraged to keep a diary about their sleeping patterns. Sleepio was rolled out in the south of England towards the end of 2018 and in 2019 was made available across London. NICE is recommending that the Sleepio app is used as cost-effective alternative to prescribed medication after is Medical Technologies Advisory Committee evaluated the platform. The committee concluded that Sleepio is more effective than conventional treatment options (sleep hygiene and medication) in reducing symptoms of insomnia in adults.

A new artificial intelligence sleep app has been developed that might be able to replace sleeping pills for insomnia sufferers. Sleepio uses an AI algorithm to provide individuals with tailored cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) said it would save the NHS money as well as reduce prescriptions of medicines such as zolpidem and zopiclone, which can be dependency forming. Its economic analysis found healthcare costs were lower after one year of using Sleepio, mostly because of fewer GP appointments and sleeping pills prescribed. The app provides a digital six-week self-help programme involving a sleep test, weekly interactive CBT-I sessions and keeping a diary about sleeping patterns.