What radio waves tell us about sleep!

The ability to assess sleep at home, capture sleep stages, and detect the occurrence of apnea (without on-body sensors) simply by analyzing the radio waves bouncing off people’s bodies while they sleep is quite powerful. Such a capability would allow for longitudinal data collection in patients’ homes, informing our understanding of sleep and its interaction with various diseases and their therapeutic responses, both in clinical trials and routine care. In this article, we develop an advanced machine-learning algorithm for passively monitoring sleep and nocturnal breathing from radio waves reflected off people while asleep. Validation results in comparison with the gold standard (i.e. polysomnography; n = 880) demonstrate that the model captures the sleep hypnogram (with an accuracy of 80.5% for 30-second epochs categorized into wake, light sleep, deep sleep, or REM), detects sleep apnea (AUROC = 0.89), and measures the patient’s Apnea–Hypopnea Index (ICC = 0.90; 95% CI = [0.88, 0.91]). Notably, the model exhibits equitable performance across race, sex, and age. Moreover, the model uncovers informative interactions between sleep stages and a range of diseases including neurological, psychiatric, cardiovascular, and immunological disorders. These findings not only hold promise for clinical practice and interventional trials but also underscore the significance of sleep as a fundamental component in understanding and managing various diseases.