AASM standards of practice compliant validation of actigraphic sleep analysis from SOMNOwatch™ versus polysomnographic sleep diagnostics shows high conformity also among subjects with sleep disordered breathing.

In recent AASM practice, parameter actimetry is cited to measure total sleep time in obstructive sleep apnoea patients, when polysomnography is not available. An actigraph was therefore compared to polysomnographic data in 28 subjects with known sleep disordered breathing. Total sleep time (TST), sleep period time (SPT), sleep efficiency (SE), sustained sleep efficiency (SSE), sleep onset latency (SL) and sleep/wake pattern were compared to gold standard polysomnography. The results of an epoch-by-epoch comparison of sleep/wake from actigraphy to sleep stages from polysomnography gave a sensitivity of 90.2%, a specificity of 95.2% and an overall accuracy of 85.9%. Correlations were moderately strong for SE (0.71, p < 0.001) and SSE (0.65, p < 0.001) and high for TST (0.89, p < 0.001), SPT (0.91, p < 0.001) and SL (0.89, p < 0.001). It was concluded that actigraphy is not identical with PSG recording but gives good results in sleep/wake patterns and predicting TST, SPT, SSE, SE and SL also in sleep apnoea patients not suffering from other sleep disorders. The difficult detection of correct sleep onset causes SSE and SL to be less predictable. Therefore a 15-epoch criterion was introduced and resulted in high correlation of 0.89 for sleep latency, but has to be tested on a bigger population.