Patent US9743848 Consumer Sleep Technology

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Patent US9743848

Issued 2017-08-29

Heart Rate Variability With Sleep Detection

A system uses continuous tracking of sleep activity and heart rate activity to evaluate heart rate variability immediately before transitioning to an awake state, e.g., at the end of the last phase of deep sleep. In particular, a wearable, continuous physiological monitoring system as described herein includes one or more sensors to detect sleep states, the transitions between sleep states, and the transitions from a sleep state to an awake state for a user. This information can be used in conjunction with continuously monitored heart rate data to calculate heart rate variability of the user at the end of the last phase of sleep preceding the user waking up. By using the history of heart rate data in conjunction with sleep activity in this manner, an accurate and consistent recovery score can be calculated based on heart rate variability.

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3 Independent Claims

1. A method of operating a wearable, continuous physiological monitoring system comprising: detecting a sleep state of a user; monitoring a heart rate of the user substantially continuously with the continuous physiological monitoring system; recording the heart rate as heart rate data; detecting a waking event at a transition from the sleep state of the user to an awake state; detecting a slow wave sleep period occurring most recently before the waking event; evaluating a quality of heart rate data using a data quality metric for the slow wave sleep period; calculating a heart rate variability for a window of predetermined duration within the slow wave sleep period having a highest quality of heart rate data according to the data quality metric; and calculating a recovery score for the user based upon the heart rate variability.
11. A system comprising: a wearable housing; one or more sensors in the wearable housing; and a processor in the wearable housing, the processor configured to operate the one or more sensors to detect a sleep state of a user wearing the wearable housing, to monitor a heart rate of the user substantially continuously, to record the heart rate as heart rate data without calculating a heart rate variability for the user, to detect a waking event at a transition from the sleep state of the user to an awake state, to detect a slow wave sleep period occurring most recently before the waking event, to evaluate a quality of heart rate data using a data quality metric for the slow wave sleep period, to calculate the heart rate variability for a window of predetermined duration within the slow wave sleep period having a highest quality of heart rate data according to the data quality metric, and to calculate a recovery score for the user based upon the heart rate variability.
16. A computer program product for operating a wearable, continuous physiological monitoring system, the computer program product comprising computer executable code embodied in a non-transitory computer readable medium that, when executing on the wearable, continuous physiological monitoring system, performs the steps of: detecting a sleep state of a user; monitoring a heart rate of the user substantially continuously with the continuous physiological monitoring system; recording the heart rate as heart rate data; detecting a waking event at a transition from the sleep state of the user to an awake state; detecting a slow wave sleep period occurring most recently before the waking event; evaluating a quality of heart rate data using a data quality metric for the slow wave sleep period; calculating a heart rate variability using a window of heart rate data within the slow wave sleep period, wherein the window is selected based on the quality of heart rate data; and calculating a recovery score for the user based upon the heart rate variability.