A 2022 Survey of Commercially Available Smartphone Apps for Sleep: Most Enhance Sleep.

Commercially available smartphone apps represent an ever-evolving and fast-growing market. Our review systematically surveyed currently available commercial sleep smartphone apps to provide details to inform both providers and patients alike, in addition to the healthy consumer market. Most current sleep apps offer a free version and are designed to be used while awake, prior to sleep, and focus on the enhancement of sleep, rather than measurement, by targeting sleep latency using auditory stimuli. Sleep apps could be considered a possible strategy for patients and consumers to improve their sleep, although further validation of specific apps is recommended.

Quantifying the effects of sleep loss: relative effect sizes of the psychomotor vigilance test, multiple sleep latency test, and maintenance of wakefulness test.

The psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) is a widely-used, minimally invasive, inexpensive, portable, and easy to administer behavioral measure of vigilance that is sensitive to sleep loss. We conducted analyses to determine the relative sensitivity of the PVT vs. the multiple sleep latency test (MSLT) and the maintenance of wakefulness test (MWT) during acute total sleep deprivation (TSD) and multiple days of sleep restriction (SR) in studies of healthy adults. Twenty-four studies met the criteria for inclusion. Since sleepiness countermeasures were administered in some of these studies, the relative sensitivity of the three measures to these interventions was also assessed. The difference in weighted effect size (eta-squared) was computed for each pair of sleepiness measures based on available raw test data (such as average PVT reaction time). Analyses revealed that the sleep measures were differentially sensitive to various types of sleep loss over time, with MSLT and MWT more sensitive to TSD than the PVT. However, sensitivity to SR was comparable for all three measures. The PVT and MSLT were found to be differentially sensitive to the administration of sleepiness countermeasures (drugs, sleep loss, etc.), but PVT and MWT were found to be comparably sensitive to these interventions. These findings suggest the potential utility of the PVT as a component of next-generation fatigue risk management systems.