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SLEEP 2026 | The performance of an EEG headband compared with polysomnography in older adults with sleep problems
Brienne Miner, MD, MHS, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, discusses the key findings of a study evaluating the performance of an EEG headband in older adults with sleep problems. Dr Miner highlights the good agreement with polysomnography, and emphasizes the potential of wearables to provide accurate sleep data. This interview took place at the 40th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) in Baltimore, MD.
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Transcript
I guess what I would say is that I’m most proud of with this study is that we looked at older adults with sleep problems and how this EEG headband performed in that population. And I’m proud of that because I think these are the people that I take care of, but they are often not evaluated in this type of work. So I was glad that we were able to focus on those people. And we allowed people to be in the study if they had sleep problems, if they took sleep medications, because again, we wanted to see, does this headband work in the people we need it to work in, the people who have sleep problems? And so what we found is really good agreement for various measures of the headband when compared to polysomnography, our gold standard for sleep evaluation...
I guess what I would say is that I’m most proud of with this study is that we looked at older adults with sleep problems and how this EEG headband performed in that population. And I’m proud of that because I think these are the people that I take care of, but they are often not evaluated in this type of work. So I was glad that we were able to focus on those people. And we allowed people to be in the study if they had sleep problems, if they took sleep medications, because again, we wanted to see, does this headband work in the people we need it to work in, the people who have sleep problems? And so what we found is really good agreement for various measures of the headband when compared to polysomnography, our gold standard for sleep evaluation. So that was things like total sleep time and wake after sleep onset. And that was even in people with the worst sleep apnea and the worst insomnia. So the headband performed really well in this population. One of the issues that we have right now in the clinical space is that our gold standard is to do in-laboratory-based polysomnography. And people don’t like that. They find that burdensome. And then the other issue is that we’re actually changing their sleep oftentimes when we bring them into the lab and we make them wear all this equipment. So I think the exciting thing is with these wearables, we’ll be able to get very good sleep data, especially wearables that include EEG measures. We’ll be able to get very good measures of sleep while people sleep in their home. We’ll be able to do that for multiple nights. And so that’s going to give us a much better sense of what habitual sleep patterns look like. And we’ll be able to do it in all kinds of populations that we haven’t been able to study previously because there are certain hard-to-reach populations that can’t do polysomnography.
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