A recently published, peer-reviewed study shows that the ambulatory sleep measuring Dreem headband with built-in algorithms analyzes sleep as accurately as polysomnography (PSG) for measurement and experts for sleep staging (or sleep stage analysis).

The study, a joint clinical trial between researchers at IRBA (French Armed Forces Biomedical Research Institute) and Dreem’s scientific research team and published in Sleep, tested the Dreem headband’s signal acquisition and performance of its sleep staging algorithms against PSG scored manually by five experts.

Twenty-five subjects completed an overnight sleep study at a sleep center wearing a PSG and a Dreem headband simultaneously. The researchers then compared the measure of brain activity (EEG), heart rate, breathing frequency, and respiration rate variability (RRV), as well as the sleep staging. The results showed that the Dreem headband acquires EEG measures that correlate with that of the PSG, measure biomarkers reliably throughout the night, and the algorithm performs sleep-staging with similar accuracy to that of the five experts manually scoring the PSG readings.

Raphael Heinzer, MD, MPH, director of the Sleep Center at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, says in a release, “This study paves the way for longitudinal sleep studies that directly monitor brain activity instead of relying merely on wrist motion.”

Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD, member of the US National Academy of Sciences and professor at Stanford University says in a release, “Dreem is at the forefront of a new revolution. This is the beginning of true, comfortable EEG sleep recordings at home. Soon, the transition to sleep recording at home and machine learning-based interpretation of sleep studies will be fulfilled. This will enhance doctors’ ability to diagnose and take care of patients remotely.”