Sleep

After a bit less than 2 hours, jepsfitbitapp retrieved my sleep data from Fitbit for the whole 2013 ( read previous post for the why (*)). Since this dataset covers the period I didn’t have a tracking device and, more broadly, I always slept at least a little bit at night, I removed all data point where it indicates I didn’t sleep. So I slept 5 hours and 37 minutes on average in 2013 with one very short night of 92 minutes and one very nice night of 12 hours and 44 minutes. Fitbits devices do not detect when you go to sleep and when you wake up: you have to tell tem (for instance by tapping 5 times on the Flex) that you go to sleep or you wake up (by the way this is a very clever way to use the Flex that has no button). Once told you are in bed the Flex manages to determine the number of minutes to fall asleep, after wakeup, asleep, awake, … The duration mentioned here is the real duration the Fitbit device considers I sleep (variable minutesAsleep). ...

After previous posts playing with Fitbit API ( part 1, part 2) I stumbled upon something a bit harder for sleep … Previous data belong to the “activities” category. In this category it is easy to get data about a specific activity over several days in one request. All parameters related to sleep are not in the same category and I couldn’t find a way to get all the sleep durations (for instance) in one query (*). So I updated the code to requests all sleep parameters for each and every day of 2013 … and I hit the limit of 150 requests per hours. ...

I don’t consider having more or better ideas than others. But I gradually realized I have less and less time for some activities like programming, electronics etc. Maybe that’s how we realize we are getting older now adults. So I decided to share these ideas rather than fueling the illusory idea that I will implement them one day. So idea 1 is about measuring sleep. I recorded animals’sleep during my Ph.D. - but it was thanks to an EEG device. I think that if you want to understand or improve something you have to first measure it in a way or another. So I started to try to measure my own sleep with an app ( Sleep Cycle). But despite its good reviews it doesn’t work, at least for me. ...

After a while, here is why I got a TV tuner for my Linux laptop, took screen captures and wrote a script to add a timestamp on pictures … I wanted to know how my (then 5-month-old) son was sleeping (his mom can be reassured: I was not planning to put electrodes on his scalp ;-) ). Get the Flash Player to see this player. var s1 = new SWFObject("../videos/player.swf",“ply”,“360”,“240”,“9”,"#FFFFFF"); s1.addParam(“allowfullscreen”,“false”); s1.addParam(“allowscriptaccess”,“sameDomain”); s1.addParam(“flashvars”,“file=../videos/081129-night.flv&image=../videos/081129-night.jpg”); s1.write(“container”); ...

Finally, a seventh scientific paper is published by the Poirrier-Falisse. After a huge batch of articles from Nandini, here is my second paper: Poirrier J.E., Guillonneau F., Renaut J., Sergeant K., Luxen A., Maquet P. and Leprince P.: " Proteomic changes in rat hippocampus and adrenals following short-term sleep deprivation" Proteome Science, 2008, 6(1):14 doi: 10.1186/1477-5956-6-14 Very briefly, in this study we show the influence of 4 hours of prolonged wakefulness in rats hippocampus and adrenals proteome. As usual, this paper is published in an Open Access journal. Here is my updated BibTeX file (and I also updated Nandini’s BibTeX file). ...