Gary Garcia-Molina, PhD, Talks About How Smart Bed Technology Enhances Pediatric Sleep Research

At the International Pediatric Sleep Association (IPSA) Congress 2022, investigators from Sleep Number presented 2 investigations that utilized its smart bed technology to analyze pediatric sleep behaviors.

Gary Garcia-Molina, PhD, Sleep Number Labs, and a team of investigators performed an ecologically-valid assessment in order to characterize overnight sleep parameters by age and sex. Data were collected from the large sample population for over 2 years.

"In one study, the goal was to understand how the continuum of the sleep patterns - the duration of asleep, the time in bed, the distribution between restful asleep and restful sleep - changes through age and also changes depending on gender," one of the study investigators said.

In the interview with HCPLive, Garcia-Molina continued to explain that before this technology, most studies consisted of self-report or caregiver report. While that can be effective for investigation, the smart bed technology offers more detailed information.

An interesting observation was the findings were consistent with previously published literature which reported later shifts in bedtime and wake time with age. However, the other interesting finding was the difference sleep behavior by gender.

"Basically, girls, women, sleep longer," he explained. "That's also known, and there are, again, different hypotheses associated with why this could be, but we find that our data provide yet another element of validation of our technology."

The second story assessed how distruptions to pediatric sleep schedules influence behavior. Not only did the study include summer vacation from school, holiday breaks, and weekends, but also took place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The results from this study were also in line with previous data in showing that bedtime schedules shift later.

"Sleep duration was longer, there was also a differentiation by age, and it's important to mention here that this chronotype shifter - that I mentioned before - is more exacerbated in boys," Garcia-Molina said. "Boys have this tendency to be of a later chronotype, to be more night hours, if you will, compared to the girls and that's also something that our data reveals."

These studies, "Age and sex differences in overnight sleep parameters in children and adolescents" and "Altered sleep patterns in children in response to changing schedules: an ecologically valid study" was included in data from the International Pediatric Sleep Association (IPSA) Congress 2022.