Recording sleepwalking

Recording sleepwalking

In order to understand my sleepwalking I needed first to be able to exhaustively record it. In other words to use an approach that identify every instance of sleepwalking.

Video monitoring to track sleepwalking

Since video monitoring is an essential part of sleepwalking studies at sleep clinics and since sleepwalking is an obvious behavior (wandering when supposed to be sleeping) I recorded my nights using a surveillance video monitoring kit.

The key features being:

• continuous recording
• night vision (infrared based)
• time stamp (to the second)

For each night I can then identify all sleepwalking events with the following characteristics: 

• time of event start
• length of event
• event description

EEG data

At this point I am not recording any EEG data, and explain why here.

Event tracking using sleep tracking devices and apps

In complement to video I am also recording data for each night event using multiple sleep tracking devices, to add the following information:

• start time of sleep
• heart rate
• sleep stage at time of event (see discussion of the validity of those data)
• testing of sleep tracking devices capabilities for sleepwalking monitoring (see sleep trackers comparison)

Using those 2 approaches I can then characterize each event, which open the way to:

• obtain a "sleepwalking" score for each night
• compare events
• try to find correlations

What does my sleepwalking look like?

Here are the data.