A polysomnography recording costs a night in a sleep laboratory. A wrist accelerometer costs almost nothing and runs for a week, which is why it can reach populations a sleep study never will — if the physiology can be recovered from it. Three strands of work test how far that goes: screening for a specific prodromal disorder, characterizing everyday movement, and predicting future health.
Wearable screening for isolated REM sleep behavior disorder. A series of studies — ambulatory detection combining actigraphy and questionnaire, its multicenter validation across devices and populations, a practical two-stage questionnaire-and-actigraphy screening protocol, and the follow-up physiological-signatures study — developed and validated actigraphy-based approaches for identifying isolated REM sleep behavior disorder, a strong prodromal marker for Parkinson’s disease and related synucleinopathies.
Gait and motor function. A separate line of work uses the same wrist accelerometry to detect walking bouts in free-living conditions, then applies that detector to characterize gait alterations associated with Parkinson’s disease — extending wearable screening from sleep into everyday movement.
Accelerometry and future health risk. The same signal, used predictively rather than diagnostically: prediction of future disease risk from a single week of wrist movement in 97,696 UK Biobank participants, and actigraphy-based differentiation of dementia etiologies in a memory-clinic population. The architectures behind this are developed under Foundation models for wrist accelerometry.
