Usability experience of remote sleep monitoring: An overview and future challenges of remote sleep monitoring in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases.

Remote sleep monitoring is an emerging area in modern medicine. In this paper, we investigate and understand the user experience of remote sleep monitoring in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. The prevalence of neurodegeneration is particularly relevant due to the increase in the elderly population. Therefore, continuous sleep monitoring is crucial to detect and prevent disease progression. We need to implement digital medicine and social care to overcome barriers to timely and equitable care. This study addresses acceptability of in home recording of sleep and activity. In this qualitative study, we investigated the acceptability, safety, feasibility and adherence to different neurotechnologies. The study procedures include interacting with clinical advisors through mobile applications, learning to use unfamiliar neurotechnologies, sharing data with clinicians, and doing biological and cognitive tests without supervision. The results show that transitioning from monitoring sleep in the lab to remote assessment at home is the preferred option for these patients. The results also highlight that we need to further review the ergonomic design principles by considering the cost, infrastructure and design of medical devices to make them more suitable for the targeted population. We must personalise technologies and remote monitoring strategies to apply this evidence to clinical practice. Our work also demonstrates some significant challenges in conducting this category of user experience study in healthcare and medical ergonomics, including time investment from carers, loss of mental capacity, retrospective biases and low adherence. To the best of our knowledge, our qualitative user experience study was the first of its kind where we focused on remote sleep monitoring using in-depth thematic analysis. This knowledge is valuable as it helps to reflect on better clinical sleep study designs and practices and improve the usage of neurotechnologies to maximise outcomes. Future research should take these suggestions to address some design challenges in academia, clinical practice and industry.