Introducing Actigraphic Data Analyzer (ADA), an open source software for sleep/wake scoring and circadian rhythm analysis with graphical interface

We introduce Actigraphic Data Analyser (ADA), a user-friendly open source Python package with a graphical user interface (GUI). It reads raw data from GENEActiv and ActiGraph devices, and the MESA dataset, supports multiple methods for collapsing data into epochs, provides sleep/wake scoring via several classical algorithms and the recently published Universal Filter Approach, offers comprehensive circadian rhythms analysis, and outputs common sleep plots and metrics like daily profiles, sleep onset, sleep fragmentation index and more. Apart from the interactive GUI, ADA can be used as a Python library. As an example of its application, we present a simple Python script revealing correlations between different descriptors of circadian rhythms: DFA, variants of cosinor, AR model spectrum, IS, IV, M10 and L5. Correlation matrix produced by this script (a figure included also in this paper) applied to a dataset of 87 weekly recordings (created for this study and freely available) reveals division of these commonly applied descriptors into two groups: one related mostly to the (length of) circadian period, and the other to the strength of the 24-h rhythm. Both the above-mentioned ADA package and set of weekly actigraphic recordings are freely available on GPLv3 and CC-BY licences, respectively.