Cognitive performance measurements and the impact of sleep quality using wearable and mobile sensors

Abstract Human cognitive performance affects a wide range of aspects of our daily lives. Numerous factors influence our cognitive performance, and cognitive performance in turn impacts our capabilities. Partial sleep deprivation in particular negatively affects vigilance, a key factor in many work tasks. Sleep in general plays a large role in physiological recovery and our capability to perform mental tasks. In this work, we focus on two research questions. First, we investigate how fluctuations in sleep quality influence cognitive vigilance. Second, we study how smartphone typing can be leveraged as a continuous measurement for cognitive vigilance and can thus be an indicator of decline in cognitive capabilities and sleep quality. We report on a 2-month field study in which we collected cognitive performance data using the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT), mobile keyboard typing metrics from participants’ personal smartphones, and sleep quality metrics through a wearable sleep-tracking ring. Our findings highlight that individual sleep metrics such as night-time heart rate, sleep latency, sleep timing, sleep restfulness, and overall sleep quantity significantly influence vigilance. Long sleep latencies can reduce reaction times up to 30 ms, abnormal sleep durations up to 20 ms, and night-time awake time up to 10 ms. Heart rate is a well-known indicator of recovery quality, and improvements in both heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) show positive variations of 15–20 ms in reaction test performance. To expand the current research on cognitive computing, we introduce smartphone typing metrics as a proxy or a complementary method for continuous passive measurement of cognitive vigilance and report on statistically significant correlations in PVT performance and typing speed and error rates. Together, our findings contribute to ubiquitous computing via a longitudinal case study with a novel wearable device, the resulting findings on the association between sleep and cognitive function, and the introduction of smartphone keyboard typing as a proxy of cognitive function.