Every day, millions of people worldwide track their steps, sleep, and activity rhythms with smartwatches and fitness trackers. These continuously collected data streams present a remarkable opportunity to transform routine self-tracking into meaningful health insights that enable individuals to understand -- and potentially influence -- their biological aging. Yet most tools for analyzing wearable data remain fragmented, proprietary, and inaccessible, creating a major barrier between this vast reservoir of personal health information and its translation into actionable insights on aging. CosinorAge is an open-source framework that estimates biological age from wearable-derived circadian, physical activity, and sleep metrics. It addresses the lack of unified, reproducible pipelines for jointly analyzing rest-activity rhythmicity, physical activity, and sleep, and linking them to health outcomes. The Python package provides an end-to-end workflow from raw data ingestion and preprocessing to feature computation and biological age estimation, supporting multiple input sources across wearables and smartwatch. It also makes available trained model parameters (open weights) derived from l
Modeling biological rhythms helps understand the complex principles behind the physical and psychological abnormalities of human bodies, to plan life schedules, and avoid persisting fatigue and mood and sleep alterations due to the desynchronization of those rhythms. The first step in modeling biological rhythms is to identify their characteristics, such as cyclic periods, phase, and amplitude. However, human rhythms are susceptible to external events, which cause irregular fluctuations in waveforms and affect the characterization of each rhythm. In this paper, we present our exploratory work towards developing a computational framework for automated discovery and modeling of human rhythms. We first identify cyclic periods in time series data using three different methods and test their performance on both synthetic data and real fine-grained biological data. We observe consistent periods are detected by all three methods. We then model inner cycles within each period through identifying change points to observe fluctuations in biological data that may inform the impact of external events on human rhythms. The results provide initial insights into the design of a computational fram
Study Objectives: Fetal sleep is a vital yet underexplored aspect of prenatal neurodevelopment. Its cyclic organization reflects the maturation of central neural circuits, and disturbances in these patterns may offer some of the earliest detectable signs of neurological compromise. This is the first review to integrate more than seven decades of research into a unified, cross-species synthesis of fetal sleep. We examine: (i) Physiology and Ontogeny-comparing human fetuses with animal models; and (ii) Methodological Evolution-transitioning from invasive neurophysiology to non-invasive monitoring and deep learning frameworks. Methods: A structured narrative synthesis was guided by a systematic literature search across four databases (PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar). From 2,925 identified records, 171 studies involving fetal sleep-related physiology, sleep-state classification, or signal-based monitoring were included in this review. Results: Across the 171 studies, fetal sleep states become clearly observable as the brain matures. In fetal sheep and baboons, organized cycling between active and quiet sleep emerges at approximately 80%-90% gestation. In humans, this d
Objective: 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD) deficiency has been associated with sleep disorders in adults. Only three cross-sectional studies were performed in children and showed an association between 25OHD deficiency and both obstructive sleep apnea syndrome and primary snoring. No longitudinal study has been performed in children from the general population. We analyzed the association between cord-blood vitamin D level at birth and night-sleep duration trajectories for children between 2 and 5-6 years old in a non-clinical cohort.Method: We included 264 children from the French EDEN mother-child birth-cohort with both cord-blood 25OHD level determined by radio-immunoassay at birth, and night-sleep trajectories for children between 2 and 5-6 years old obtained by the group-based trajectory modeling method. Associations between 25OHD and sleep trajectories were assessed by multinomial logistic regression adjusted for maternal and child characteristics.Results: The trajectories short sleep (<10h30/night), medium-low sleep (10h30-11h00/night), medium-high sleep ($\approx$11h30/night), long sleep ($\ge$11h30/night) and changing sleep (decreased from $\ge$11h30 to 10h30-11h00/night) r
Human activities follow daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms. The emergence of these rhythms is related to physiology and natural cycles as well as social constructs. The human body and biological functions undergo near 24-hour rhythms (circadian rhythms). The frequency of these rhythms is more or less similar across people, but its phase is different. In the chronobiology literature, based on the propensity to sleep at different hours of the day, people are categorized into morning-type, evening-type, and intermediate-type groups called \textit{chronotypes}. This typology is typically based on carefully designed questionnaires or manually crafted features drawing on data on timings of people's activity. Here we develop a fully data-driven (unsupervised) method to decompose individual temporal activity patterns into components. This has the advantage of not including any predetermined assumptions about sleep and activity hours, but the results are fully context-dependent and determined by the most prominent features of the activity data. Using a year-long dataset from mobile phone screen usage logs of 400 people, we find four emergent temporal components: morning activity, night act
Time irreversibility (TIR) refers to the manifestation of nonequilibrium brain activity influenced by various physiological conditions; however, the influence of sleep on electroencephalogram (EEG) TIR has not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, a comprehensive study on permutation TIR (pTIR) of EEG data under different sleep stages is conducted. Two basic ordinal patterns (i.e., the original and amplitude permutations) are distinguished to simplify sleep EEGs, and then the influences of equal values and forbidden permutation on pTIR are elucidated. To detect pTIR of brain electric signals, 5 groups of EEGs in the awake, stages I, II, III, and rapid eye movement (REM) stages are collected from the public Polysomnographic Database in PhysioNet. Test results suggested that the pTIR of sleep EEGs significantly decreases as the sleep stage increases (p<0.001), with the awake and REM EEGs, demonstrating greater differences than others. Comparative analysis and numerical simulations support the importance of equal values. Distribution of equal states, a simple quantification of amplitude fluctuations, significantly increases with the sleep stage (p<0.001). If these equal
Sleep stage classification is critical for diagnosing and managing disorders like sleep apnea and insomnia. However, conventional methods like polysomnography are costly and impractical for long-term, home-based monitoring. This study presents an energy-efficient approach for detecting four sleep stages (wake, rapid eye movement (REM), light sleep, deep sleep) using a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. We evaluate various machine learning and deep learning models, introducing two windowing strategies: (1) a 5-minute window with 30-second steps for machine learning and (2) a 30-second window with 10-second steps for deep learning, enabling 10-second temporal resolution for real-time predictions. While deep learning models like MobileNet-v1 achieve high accuracy (92%) and F1-score (91%), their energy demands make them unsuitable for wearables. To address this, we design SleepLiteCNN, optimized for ECG-based sleep staging, achieving 89\% accuracy and 89% F1-score while minimizing energy use. Applying 8-bit quantization further reduces energy consumption to 5.48 microJ per inference, with 90% accuracy and F1-score. Additionally, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) deployment
The gut microbiota has emerged as a fundamental regulator of sleep physiology, influencing neural, endocrine, and immune pathways through the gut-microbiota-brain axis (GMBA). This bidirectional communication system modulates neurotransmitter production, circadian rhythms, and metabolic homeostasis, while disruptions in microbial composition have been linked to sleep disorders, neuroinflammation, and systemic immune dysfunction. Recent findings suggest that gut dysbiosis contributes to sleep disturbances by altering serotonin, GABA, and short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) metabolism, with implications for neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic syndromes, and mood disorders. Additionally, the gut microbiota interacts with the endocrine and immune systems, shaping inflammatory responses and stress adaptation mechanisms. This review explores the intricate connections between sleep and the gut microbiota, integrating emerging research on microbiota-targeted therapies, such as probiotics, fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), and chrononutrition, as potential interventions to restore sleep homeostasis and improve health outcomes
Mobility restrictions imposed to suppress coronavirus transmission can alter physical activity (PA) and sleep patterns. Characterization of response heterogeneity and their underlying reasons may assist in tailoring customized interventions. We obtained wearable data covering baseline, incremental movement restriction and lockdown periods from 1824 city-dwelling, working adults aged 21 to 40 years, incorporating 206,381 nights of sleep and 334,038 days of PA. Four distinct rest activity rhythms (RARs) were identified using k-means clustering of participants' temporally distributed step counts. Hierarchical clustering of the proportion of time spent in each of these RAR revealed 4 groups who expressed different mixtures of RAR profiles before and during the lockdown. Substantial but asymmetric delays in bedtime and waketime resulted in a 24 min increase in weekday sleep duration with no loss in sleep efficiency. Resting heart rate declined 2 bpm. PA dropped an average of 38%. 4 groups with different compositions of RAR profiles were found. Three were better able to maintain PA and weekday/weekend differentiation during lockdown. The least active group comprising 51 percent of the sa
Human cognitive performance is critical to productivity, learning, and accident avoidance. Cognitive performance varies throughout each day and is in part driven by intrinsic, near 24-hour circadian rhythms. Prior research on the impact of sleep and circadian rhythms on cognitive performance has typically been restricted to small-scale laboratory-based studies that do not capture the variability of real-world conditions, such as environmental factors, motivation, and sleep patterns in real-world settings. Given these limitations, leading sleep researchers have called for larger in situ monitoring of sleep and performance. We present the largest study to date on the impact of objectively measured real-world sleep on performance enabled through a reframing of everyday interactions with a web search engine as a series of performance tasks. Our analysis includes 3 million nights of sleep and 75 million interaction tasks. We measure cognitive performance through the speed of keystroke and click interactions on a web search engine and correlate them to wearable device-defined sleep measures over time. We demonstrate that real-world performance varies throughout the day and is influenced
Accurate phase estimation -- the process of assigning phase values between $0$ and $2π$ to repetitive or periodic signals -- is a cornerstone in the analysis of oscillatory signals across diverse fields, from neuroscience to robotics, where it is fundamental, e.g., to understanding coordination in neural networks, cardiorespiratory coupling, and human-robot interaction. However, existing methods are often limited to offline processing and/or constrained to one-dimensional signals. In this paper, we introduce ROPE, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first phase-estimation algorithm capable of (i) handling signals of arbitrary dimension and (ii) operating in real-time, with minimal error. ROPE identifies repetitions within the signal to segment it into (pseudo-)periods and assigns phase values by performing efficient, tractable searches over previous signal segments. We extensively validate the algorithm on a variety of signal types, including trajectories from chaotic dynamical systems, human motion-capture data, and electrocardiographic recordings. Our results demonstrate that ROPE is robust against noise and signal drift, and achieves significantly superior performance co
Chronobiological rhythms, such as the circadian rhythm, have long been linked to neurological disorders, but it is currently unknown how pathological processes affect the expression of biological rhythms in the brain. Here, we use the unique opportunity of long-term, continuous intracranially recorded EEG from 38 patients (totalling 6338 hours) to delineate circadian (daily) and ultradian (minute to hourly) rhythms in different brain regions. We show that functional circadian and ultradian rhythms are diminished in pathological tissue, independent of regional variations. We further demonstrate that these diminished rhythms are persistent in time, regardless of load or occurrence of pathological events. These findings provide evidence that brain pathology is functionally associated with persistently diminished chronobiological rhythms in vivo in humans, independent of regional variations or pathological events. Future work interacting with, and restoring, these modulatory chronobiological rhythms may allow for novel therapies.
Study Objective: Sleep is reflected not only in the electroencephalogram but also in heart rhythms and breathing patterns. Therefore, we hypothesize that it is possible to accurately stage sleep based on the electrocardiogram (ECG) and respiratory signals. Methods: Using a dataset including 8,682 polysomnographs, we develop deep neural networks to stage sleep from ECG and respiratory signals. Five deep neural networks consisting of convolutional networks and long short-term memory networks are trained to stage sleep using heart and breathing, including the timing of R peaks from ECG, abdominal and chest respiratory effort, and the combinations of these signals. Results: ECG in combination with the abdominal respiratory effort achieve the best performance for staging all five sleep stages with a Cohen's kappa of 0.600 (95% confidence interval 0.599 -- 0.602); and 0.762 (0.760 -- 0.763) for discriminating awake vs. rapid eye movement vs. non-rapid eye movement sleep. The performance is better for young participants and for those with a low apnea-hypopnea index, while it is robust for commonly used outpatient medications. Conclusions: Our results validate that ECG and respiratory effo
Common models of circadian rhythms are constructed as compartmental reactions of well mixed biochemicals involving a negative-feedback loop containing several intermediate reaction steps in order to enable oscillations. Spatial transport of reactants is mimicked as an extra compartmental reaction step. In this letter, we show that a single activation-repression biochemical reaction pair is enough to produce sustained oscillations, if the sites of both reactions are spatially separated and molecular transport is mediated by diffusion. Our proposed scenario is the simplest possible one in terms of the participating chemical reactions and provides a conceptual basis for understanding biological oscillations and triggering in-vitro assays aimed at constructing minimal clocks.
The nervous system displays a variety of rhythms in both waking and sleep. These rhythms have been closely associated with different behavioral and cognitive states, but it is still unknown how the nervous system makes use of these rhythms to perform functionally important tasks. To address those questions, it is first useful to understood in a mechanistic way the origin of the rhythms, their interactions, the signals which create the transitions among rhythms, and the ways in which rhythms filter the signals to a network of neurons. This talk discusses how dynamical systems have been used to investigate the origin, properties and interactions of rhythms in the nervous system. It focuses on how the underlying physiology of the cells and synapses of the networks shape the dynamics of the network in different contexts, allowing the variety of dynamical behaviors to be displayed by the same network. The work is presented using a series of related case studies on different rhythms. These case studies are chosen to highlight mathematical issues, and suggest further mathematical work to be done. The topics include: different roles of excitation and inhibition in creating synchronous asse
As sleep disorders are becoming more prevalent there is an urgent need to classify sleep stages in a less disturbing way.In particular, sleep-stage classification using simple sensors, such as single-channel electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), electromyography (EMG), or electrocardiography (ECG) has gained substantial interest. In this study, we proposed a sleep model that predicts the next sleep stage and used it to improve sleep classification accuracy. The sleep models were built using sleep-sequence data and employed either statistical $n$-gram or deep neural network-based models. We developed beam-search decoding to combine the information from the sensor and the sleep models. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance of the $n$-gram and long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN)-based sleep models and demonstrated the improvement of sleep-stage classification using an EOG sensor. The developed sleep models significantly improved the accuracy of sleep-stage classification, particularly in the absence of an EEG sensor.
Sleep plays an important role in incremental learning and consolidation of memories in biological systems. Motivated by the processes that are known to be involved in sleep generation in biological networks, we developed an algorithm that implements a sleep-like phase in artificial neural networks (ANNs). After initial training phase, we convert the ANN to a spiking neural network (SNN) and simulate an offline sleep-like phase using spike-timing dependent plasticity rules to modify synaptic weights. The SNN is then converted back to the ANN and evaluated or trained on new inputs. We demonstrate several performance improvements after applying this processing to ANNs trained on MNIST, CUB200 and a motivating toy dataset. First, in an incremental learning framework, sleep is able to recover older tasks that were otherwise forgotten in the ANN without sleep phase due to catastrophic forgetting. Second, sleep results in forward transfer learning of unseen tasks. Finally, sleep improves generalization ability of the ANNs to classify images with various types of noise. We provide a theoretical basis for the beneficial role of the brain-inspired sleep-like phase for the ANNs and present an
Sleep is commonly studied through neurochemical, evolutionary, and behavioral frameworks, typically emphasizing circadian rhythms and energy conservation. However, these approaches do not fully explain a deeper biophysical question: why does sleep universally involve physical stillness, a lying posture, and disconnection from conscious control? This paper introduces a new hypothesis that sleep is not merely a biological function, but a state of vibrational synchronization between the human body and natural frequencies generated by the Earth. In this state, the body reduces its autonomous activity and aligns with external environmental rhythms, allowing for energy restoration, internal recalibration, and systemic reorganization. This perspective reframes life as a continuous process of internally driven vibration influenced by external physical fields. The proposed model offers new avenues for understanding aging, health, death, and consciousness.
Despite being crucial to health and quality of life, sleep -- especially pediatric sleep -- is not yet well understood. This is exacerbated by lack of access to sufficient pediatric sleep data with clinical annotation. In order to accelerate research on pediatric sleep and its connection to health, we create the Nationwide Children's Hospital (NCH) Sleep DataBank and publish it at Physionet and the National Sleep Research Resource (NSRR), which is a large sleep data common with physiological data, clinical data, and tools for analyses. The NCH Sleep DataBank consists of 3,984 polysomnography studies and over 5.6 million clinical observations on 3,673 unique patients between 2017 and 2019 at NCH. The novelties of this dataset include: 1) large-scale sleep dataset suitable for discovering new insights via data mining, 2) explicit focus on pediatric patients, 3) gathered in a real-world clinical setting, and 4) the accompanying rich set of clinical data. The NCH Sleep DataBank is a valuable resource for advancing automatic sleep scoring and real-time sleep disorder prediction, among many other potential scientific discoveries.
Recent advances in sleep neurobiology have allowed development of physiologically based mathematical models of sleep regulation that account for the neuronal dynamics responsible for the regulation of sleep-wake cycles and allow detailed examination of the underlying mechanisms. Neuronal systems in general, and those involved in sleep regulation in particular, are noisy and heterogeneous by their nature. It has been shown in various systems that certain levels of noise and diversity can significantly improve signal encoding. However, these phenomena, especially the effects of diversity, are rarely considered in the models of sleep regulation. The present paper is focused on a neuron-based physiologically motivated model of sleep-wake cycles that proposes a novel mechanism of the homeostatic regulation of sleep based on the dynamics of a wake-promoting neuropeptide orexin. Here this model is generalized by the introduction of intrinsic diversity and noise in the orexin-producing neurons in order to study the effect of their presence on the sleep-wake cycle. A quantitative measure of the quality of a sleep-wake cycle is introduced and used to systematically study the generalized mode