Longitudinal changes in sleep duration, timing, variability, and stages during the COVID-19 pandemic: Large-scale Fitbit data 

Michael Grandner, Naghmeh Rezaei, 214 Longitudinal changes in sleep duration, timing, variability, and stage during the COVID-19 pandemic: large-scale Fitbit data, Sleep, Vol. 44, Supplement_2, May 2021, p. A86 Retrieved from https: // doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsab072.213

Commentary

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a transformation of daily life, but this study analyzed objective, long-term data to investigate sleep-related changes at the population level.

Participants included 163,524 anonymized active Fitbit users who lived in areas hit particularly hard by the pandemic (Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Miami). Sleep variables extracted include average nightly and weekly sleep and bedtime, variability in sleep and bedtime (standard deviation), estimated arousal and sleep stages. deviations from a similar timeframe in 2019 were investigated. All analyses were performed in Python.

The results detailed how sleep duration and timing changed longitudinally compared to the previous year's data, stratified by age group and gender. Average sleep duration increased by 5 to 11 minutes in almost all groups, and by category, sleep duration increased in some and decreased in others, but extended more than limited. Sleep stages shifted later in almost all groups (p <0.00001). Categorically, bedtime was delayed for some and advanced for others, but more delayed than advanced.

Additionally, the difference between weekdays and weekends decreased, resulting in less variability between periods and bedtimes; WASO increased, REM% increased, and Deep% decreased.

FitBit will be the wearable device and this study is done in cooperation with the FitBit manufacturing company.