Wearable sleep recording devices may be a helpful alternative method for PSG due to their higher accessibility and comfort as well as lower cost. Still, their validities need to be examined. The aim of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of a novel single-electroencephalographic (EEG) channel-based wearable forehead sleep recorder (UMindSleep) on sleep staging and desaturation.

Two hundred and three Chinese adults recruited from a sleep medicine center underwent an overnight study wearing UMindSleep and polysomnography (PSG) simultaneously. Sleep parameters including sleep staging and oxygen desaturation index (ODI) were compared between UMindSleep and PSG.

A total of 195,349 valid epochs from 197 participants (171 with OSA, 86.8%) were included into analyses of sleep staging. Sensitivities of UMindSleep compared to PSG were 79.7% for Wake, 85.8% for Light Sleep, 79.4% for Deep Sleep, and 82.7% for REM Sleep. Specificities were 95.3% for Wake, 83.4% for Light Sleep, 97.0% for Deep Sleep, and 96.8% for REM Sleep. Furthermore, the kappa agreements of 0.69-0.79 were indicative of a substantial agreement for sleep staging between UMindSleep and PSG. Sensitivity and Specificity regarding ODI were 93.4% and 88.9%, yielding a kappa coefficient of 0.82.

Our findings suggest that UMindSleep may serve as a feasible, accurate and dependable device for screening of sleep disorders (e.g., OSA) and assessing sleep structure.