An App to Help Individuals with Insomnia Treat Their Sleep Disorder

Abstract

Insomnia, which increases the difficulty of falling asleep throughout the night, is the most common sleep-related disorder. Insomnia can not only lower one's energy levels, but also one's health, work performance, and overall quality of life. In fact, insomnia’s detrimental impacts on an individual’s sleep can lead to life-threatening circumstances. Several studies have additionally found a statistically significant increase in insomnia severity over time which was disproportionately more pronounced among Hispanics compared to non-Hispanic whites. We are designing an app, Dreams, to provide individuals with insomnia easy access to a platform to treat their sleep disorder by maintaining a sleep schedule that will ultimately improve their quality of sleep and overall quality of life. This app is programmed to track the time users get in bed, the time they wake up, and how long they sleep. They have a 2-week evaluation, and the average sleep time (AST) is calculated. Users will then be instructed to stay in bed at night for the length of the calculated AST every day for a whole week regardless of whether they sleep the entire time. They must follow this with 85% accuracy to increase their time in bed (TIB) by 15-30 minutes for the next week. If they fail to do so, they must continue the next week with the same TIB as the previous week. This algorithm has been used by sleep care practices throughout America. In the future, we plan to use user data to continuously update our algorithm to provide individuals with the greatest opportunity for success in the hopes of treating their sleep disorders. We further plan to update this app to sync with smartwatches to more accurately track sleep and other vitals to provide users the greatest opportunity to cure their sleep disorders.