Sensor-Based Estimation of Dim Light Melatonin Onset (DLMO) Using Features of Two Time Scales
Circadian rhythms govern most essential biological processes in the human body; they influence multiple biological activities including sleep, performance, mood, skin temperature, hormone production, and nutrient absorption. The dim light melatonin onset (DLMO) is the current gold standard for measuring human circadian phase (or timing). The collection of DLMO is expensive and time consuming since multiple saliva or blood samples are required from nighttime studies in specialized environmental conditions. In the past few years, several non-invasive approaches have been designed for estimating DLMO values. These methods collect daily sampled data (e.g., sleep onset/offset times) or frequently sampled data (e.g., light exposure, skin temperature, physical activity collected every minute) to train learning models for estimating DLMO, therefore previous studies only leveraged one time scale. In this paper, we propose a two-step framework for estimating DLMO using the data of both time scales. The first step summarizes the data prior to the current day, while the second step combines this summary with frequently sampled data of the current day. We evaluate several variants of moving average model which input sleep timing data as the first step and recurrent neural network models as the second step for estimating DLMO. The experimental results show that our two-step model with two-time-scale features has statistically significantly lower root-mean-square errors than the models that use either daily sampled data or frequently sampled data alone.
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