An open science resource for accelerating scalable digital health research in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions

The Simons Sleep Project (SSP) is an open-science resource designed to accelerate digital health research into sleep and daily behaviors of autistic children. The SSP contains data from Dreem3 EEG headbands, multi-sensor EmbracePlus smartwatches and Withings' sleep mats, as well as parent questionnaires and daily sleep diaries. It contains data from >3,600 days and nights collected from 102 children (aged 10-17 years) with idiopathic autism and 98 of their nonautistic siblings, and enables access to whole-exome sequencing for all participants. Here we present the breadth of available harmonized data and show that digital devices have higher accuracy and reliability compared to parent reports. The data show that autistic children have longer sleep-onset latencies than their siblings and longer latencies are associated with behavioral difficulties in all participants, regardless of diagnosis. The results highlight the advantages of using digital devices and demonstrate the opportunities afforded by the SSP to study autism and develop broad digital phenotyping techniques.