The 26th Annual Sleep Awareness Week ®, sponsored by National Sleep Foundation (NSF), takes place March 10th – 16th and emphasizes the importance of sleep to overall health. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA)® has collaborated with NSF since 2014 on the development of a series of industry standards for sleep technology.
Importance of Sleep to Overall Health
Sleep plays a vital role in good health and well-being throughout an individual’s life. According to a 2022 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Study, about 1 in 3 adults in the United States reported not getting enough rest or sleep every day.
How an individual feels while awake depends largely on what happens while they are sleeping. While sleeping, the body works to support healthy brain function and maintaining individual health.
Ensuring adequate sleep over time can reduce the risk for chronic health problems affecting f the heart and circulatory system, metabolism, respiratory system, and immune system. Adequate sleep can also have beneficial effects on how an individual thinks, reacts, works, learns, and gets along with others.
The Hope for Sleep Technology
Digital Health technology promises to improve the tracking of individual sleep patterns, promoting better sleep hygiene, and managing sleep-related disorders. Specifically, the technology is providing information on monitoring sleep patterns, personalized insights into sleep, tracking sleep disorders, supporting behavioral changes, supporting remote monitoring and intervention, integration with other health data, and research and development.
Consumers are expressing an interest in the adoption of technology and based on CTA’s Driving Consumer Adoption of Digital Health Solutions study, among those interested in using but have never used, 78% feel sleep apnea monitors would be helpful in improving their overall well-being. Studies[1] also show that the demand is greater for technology that has been evaluated and endorsed.
Setting the Standard
Industry standards help drive innovation while promoting best practices, which also helps to drive broader consumer adoption. CTA and NSF have been collaborating on the development of sleep standards since 2014. The current portfolio includes:
These standards set common terminology, methodology of measurements, and performance criteria that can be used when determining the selection of which sleep technology solutions are best for the use case at hand.
What’s Next
As we continue to learn more about the importance of sleep on overall health, plus the power of digital health technologies in this space, additional standards will be needed to support the sleep-related technology. CTA and NSF will continue to collaborate on standardization that advances innovation in this space.
Get involved: cta.tech/standards.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352721823002917