Improving Sleeping Habits: Preliminary Experiments in Barcelona and Lleida

Abstract

Due to intrinsic (e.g., daily-life habits) and extrinsic (e.g., environmental change) factors, people are far to have a healthy life and, thus, there is an increase of chronic diseases, mental disorders, and premature death. In this paper, we propose a solution to improve lifestyle habits in terms of sleeping activity through an intelligent system that monitors the sleeping and further habits together with environmental data and provides personalized recommendations and nudges. Our solution aims to study how to improve sleeping habits of citizens, investigating if and how the environment impacts the sleeping activity, as well as how it may be influenced by bad lifestyle habits. To perform a feasibility study of the proposed solution, on May we started recruiting volunteers in Barcelona (from Eurecat) and in Lleida (from IRBLleida). Volunteers were asked to wear their activity tracker 24/7, to weight once a week, and to answer the selected questionnaires at the end of the week. The day of the inclusion, we also took note of the comfort of the bed of each volunteer, as well as her/his address to take into consideration the environmental factors. Preliminary experiments clearly show the need for improving sleeping habits in the population and, thus, of intelligent solutions like the one presented in this paper.