Off-Body Sleep Analysis for Predicting Adverse Behavior in Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2024 Nov;28(11):6886-6896. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2024.3455942. Epub 2024 Nov 6.

Abstract

Poor sleep quality in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) individuals is linked to severe daytime behaviors. This study explores the relationship between a prior night's sleep structure and its predictive power for next-day behavior in ASD individuals. The motion was extracted using a low-cost near-infrared camera in a privacy-preserving way. Over two years, we recorded overnight data from 14 individuals, spanning over 2000 nights, and tracked challenging daytime behaviors, including aggression, self-injury, and disruption. We developed an ensemble machine learning algorithm to predict next-day behavior in the morning and the afternoon. Our findings indicate that sleep quality is a more reliable predictor of morning behavior than afternoon behavior the next day. The proposed model attained an accuracy of 74% and a F1 score of 0.74in target-sensitive tasks and 67% accuracy and 0.69 F1 score in target-insensitive tasks. For 7 of the 14, better-than-chance balanced accuracy was obtained (p-value 0.05), with 3 showing significant trends (p-value 0.1). These results suggest off-body, privacy-preserving sleep monitoring as a viable method for predicting next-day adverse behavior in ASD individuals, with the potential for behavioral intervention and enhanced care in social and learning settings.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Algorithms
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder* / diagnostic imaging
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder* / physiopathology
  • Child
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning*
  • Male
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Sleep / physiology
  • Young Adult