WAKING UP TO EXCESSIVE DAYTIME SLEEPINESS IN PSYCHIATRY AND HOW TO MAKE WEARABLES WORK FOR MEASURING SLEEP AND ACTIVITY

Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) is pervasive across psychiatric disorders but remains under-measured, under-treated, and mechanistically opaque. Current practice relies on coarse self-report instruments and clinic-based snapshots that miss day-today variability, medication effects, circadian misalignment, and the bidirectional links among sleep, activity, mood, and cognition. Wearable sensors offer continuous, low-burden assessment of sleep and activity in naturalistic settings, but their clinical utility in psychiatry is limited by heterogeneous algorithms, sparse validation against gold standards, and insufficient attention to disorder-specific confounds (e.g., psychomotor retardation/activation, antipsychotic sedation, stimulant rebound, irregular schedules). This proposed workshop brings two world experts with the common them of making wearables work for psychiatry. Dr. Mignot will take a deeper dive in the phenomenology, neurobiology, clinical characterization, and health-related burdens associated with excessive daytime sleepiness. Dr. Athreya will present in detail about his longitudinal study that monitored sleep and activity related biomarkers with commercially available wearable devices. Dr. Bill Bobo, a leading psychiatric researcher, will then lead the audience in an engaged conversation to provide practical hands-on experience in working with these devices to monitor health related outcomes in individuals with psychiatric disorders.

Learning Objective 1: Describe the burden associated with excessive daytime sleepiness in psychiatric disorders

Learning Objective 2: Discuss the utility of commercially available wearable devices in monitoring sleep and activity for patients with psychiatric disorders

References

Pérez-Carbonell, L., Mignot, E., Leschziner, G., and Dauvilliers, Y. (2022). Understanding and approaching excessive daytime sleepiness. The Lancet, 400(10357), 1033-1046. Dyrbye LN, West CP, Wilton AR, Satele DV, Athreya AP. Smartwatch Use and Physician Well-Being: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Netw Open. 2025 Aug 1;8(8):e2527275.