In order to understand the role of sleep in child and adolescent health and disease we take a multimodal approach and make use of the following methods:
Sleep and Waking EEG: The EEG records the electrical activity of the brain non-invasively and is a measure of brain structure and function. By measuring the brain while in both waking and sleep, we can gain novel insight into the workings of the developing brain.
Actigraphy: Actigraphy is a wrist-worn device much like a watch, the delineate sleep from waking based on motion. Actigraphs can be worn daily to track sleep-wake behavior over several months.
Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA): Applications running on a cell phone can be used to measure a multitude of behavioral/mood states several times a day in a participant’s natural environment. By repeatedly measuring experiences, moods and behaviors in real-time we can obtain a more comprehensive measure of our outcomes.
Signal Processing: We use time-series, signal processing and statistical methods to decode the signals we obtain with the aim of gaining insight into the developmental processes.
