Sleep disturbances are common after stroke and may affect recovery and rehabilitation outcomes. Sleep monitoring in the hospital environment is not routine practice yet may offer insight into how the hospital environment influences post-stroke sleep quality while also enabling us to investigate the relationships between sleep quality and neuroplasticity, physical activity, fatigue levels, and recovery of functional independence while undergoing rehabilitation. Commonly used sleep monitoring devices can be expensive, which limits their use in clinical settings. Therefore, there is a need for low-cost methods to monitor sleep quality in hospital settings. This study compared a commonly used actigraphy sleep monitoring device with a low-cost commercial device. Eighteen adults with stroke wore the Philips Actiwatch to monitor sleep latency, sleep time, number of awakenings, time spent awake, and sleep efficiency. A sub-sample (n = 6) slept with the Withings Sleep Analyzer in situ, recording the same sleep parameters. Intraclass correlation coefficients and Bland-Altman plots indicated poor agreement between the devices. Usability issues and inconsistencies were reported between the objectively measured sleep parameters recorded by the Withings device compared with the Philips Actiwatch. While these findings suggest that low-cost devices are not suitable for use in a hospital environment, further investigations in larger cohorts of adults with stroke are needed to examine the utility and accuracy of off-the-shelf low-cost devices to monitor sleep quality in the hospital environment.
Keywords: activity threshold; awakenings; fatigue; level of agreement; rehabilitation; stroke.