Wearable Technology Advances Understanding of Circadian Health and Chronic Disease Prevention
A renewed collaborative partnership between Monash University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital is leveraging wearable technology to enhance the understanding of sleep and circadian health. This international alliance, now in its seventeenth year, aims to bridge basic sleep physiology, clinical trials, and public health policy. Wearables allow for continuous monitoring of multiple dimensions of sleep health, including duration, timing, regularity, and quality, alongside wake activities, over extended periods in natural environments. This approach moves beyond fragmented data collection methods like single-night in-lab polysomnography and self-report questionnaires, which often miss night-to-night variability and the nuanced relationship between sleep and other behaviors. Emmanuel Stamatakis, PhD, director of Brain Park at Monash University’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, highlights that wearables have popularized the idea of sleep as part of a 24-hour day, integrating it with other lifestyle... 
