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Circadian science Lighting Technology

My New Year’s (Circadian) Resolution

Although circadian rhythms are being recognized more and more for their relevance to jet lag, shift work, the grogginess people feel after daylight saving time transitions, and health and medicine at large, it’s still a long way behind sleep in entering popular discourse. People know “8 hours a night,” but they don’t know “align your […]

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Circadian science Interviews Technology

Interview With Bharath A.

Thanks so much for joining us this morning! Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests? I am currently a theoretical and computational chronobiologist. I work in the area of circadian clocks. My PhD was in the field of wireless communications with a focus on designing new technology to provide […]

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Circadian science Technology

Visualizing MESA: Part 2

We’ve already looked at the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) dataset—an absolute treasure trove of sleep data, available from the NSRR at sleepdata.org—once, through the lens of sleep duration. But what about other dimensions of sleep health? After all, sleep regularity may be just as important as sleep duration in a number of contexts. We […]

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Circadian science Sleeping troubles Technology

One Simple* Rule for Understanding Your Sleep

My friend sent this to me the other day: “If I go to bed at 10:30 pm, I often wake up at 4:30 or 5:30 am and can’t go back to sleep. But if I go to bed at 1:00 am, I fall asleep easily and can sleep until 9:00 am. Throughout the work week […]

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Circadian science Technology

Scientific Tests

Algorithms are really easy to mess up. Take your pick for how: overfitting to training data, having bad training data, having too little training data, encoding human bias from your training data in the model and calling it “objective”. Feeding in new data that’s in the wrong format. Typos, subtle typos, nightmarishly subtle typos. Your […]

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Circadian science Technology

Biophysics for Better Living 2.0

In my last blog post, I talked about the power and potential for biophysics engines to contribute to clinical care and ragged on my own ability to play video games. The short version of it, if you don’t have time to circle back: If you’re going to make a digital twin of somebody, base it […]

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Circadian science Technology

Biophysics for Better Living

One of the highest stakes moments of my life was the time in graduate school when I was (badly) playing Donkey Kong at Pinball Pete’s Arcade, and a very, very good Donkey Kong player came over to watch me play in silence. I’d just spent six dollars worth in quarters dying repeatedly on the first […]

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Circadian science Interviews Sleeping troubles Technology

Interview with Dr. Cathy Goldstein

We sat down to talk with Dr. Goldstein on what she sees as the future of wearables in the sleep clinic. Enjoy! Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today! Could you take a minute to introduce yourself and say a little about what your job is? Cathy Goldstein, MD. I’m a […]

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Circadian science Technology

Yesterday’s Weather and Your Health Data

I love my Apple Watch. The ability to track my exercise, heart rate, activity levels, and sleep has enabled a real awareness of how my physical and mental health changes over time. The ability to track personal health data over long time periods outside of laboratories is one of the most exciting developments of the […]

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Technology

Circadian Phase Estimation and Deep Learning

One of the most common questions we get at Arcascope is… “Can’t you just do circadian phase estimation using machine learning?” Living in the data age, we have become used to thinking that big data and machine learning can do just about anything. In this post, I will break down some of the unique challenges […]