Actigraphy as a modern method for diagnosing sleep disorders and various pathologies

Medicine of the 21st century has an extensive arsenal of means for diagnosing diseases. High-tech equipment can detect pathologies without clinical manifestations during the latent stage of disease development. Actigraphy is a portable device based on an accelerometer, used for tracking sleep parameters, and also, well established as a tool for monitoring the circadian rhythms of a person. Actigraphy is not an alternative to the use of polysomnography, however, it has advantages in ease of use, cost, and size of the device, in addition to allowing long-term continuous recording of night and daytime sleep over several days or weeks in the patient's home sleep environment. In addition to its primary function — the study of sleep characteristics — actigraphy is widely used as a method for detecting and monitoring diseases, including cognitive impairment, psychiatric disorders, cardiovascular pathologies, and respiratory diseases. In this review, we have compiled current information on actigraphy as a tool for disease diagnosis. The described results allow us to summarize the useful characteristics of such a diagnostic tool and shed light on applying this progressive and reliable method in medicine.