Cognitive Performance Measurements and the Impact of Sleep Quality Using Wearable and Mobile Sensors

TL;DR

This study investigates how sleep quality affects cognitive performance using wearable sensors, mobile data, and a 2-month field study, revealing significant sleep metrics impact cognition and proposing smartphone typing as a passive measurement tool.

Contribution

It introduces smartphone typing metrics as a novel passive proxy for cognitive performance and provides longitudinal insights into sleep-cognition relationships with wearable technology.

Findings

Sleep metrics like heart rate and sleep latency significantly affect cognition.

Smartphone typing metrics correlate with cognitive performance measures.

Longitudinal data supports passive, continuous cognitive assessment methods.

Abstract

Human cognitive performance is an underlying factor in most of our daily lives, and numerous factors influence cognitive performance. In this work, we investigate how changes in sleep quality influence cognitive performance, measured from a dataset collected during a 2-month field study. We collected cognitive performance data (alertness) with the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT), mobile keyboard typing metrics from participants' smartphones, and sleep quality metrics through a wearable sleep tracking ring. Our findings highlight that specific sleep metrics like night-time heart rate, sleep latency, sleep timing, sleep restfulness, and overall sleep quantity significantly influence cognitive performance. To strengthen the current research on cognitive measurements, we introduce smartphone typing metrics as a proxy or a complementary method for continuous passive measurement of cognitive performance. Together, our findings contribute to ubiquitous computing via a longitudinal case study with a novel wearable device, the resulting findings on the association between sleep and cognitive function, and the introduction of smartphone keyboard typing as a proxy of cognitive function.