Circadia: Web-Based Data
Collection tool for Circadian
and Cognition Data
Deep Patel, Henry Hollis, Xuan Luo
Introduction
• Circadian rhythms (and sleep) affect metabolism, learning,
memory, neurodegenerative disease, lifespan, etc. (Maas et al.,
2020)
• Common wisdom is sleep plays a major role in cognition but
testing involves expensive sleep lab studies on specialized
machines
• A considerable fraction of society suffers from insufficient sleep,
affecting all age groups and socioeconomic classes (Chattu et al.,
2019).
• With such a pervasive problem, it’s worthwhile to figure out the
impact of this sleeplessness. Relevant to jobs like first
responders, physicians, military, pilots, etc.
Patke, A., Young, M.W. & Axelrod, S. Molecular mechanisms and
physiological importance of circadian rhythms. Nat Rev Mol Cell
Biol 21, 67–84 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-019-0179-2
Introduction Biology/Physiology
• sleep/wake cycles is composed of two parts:
the homeostatic and the circadian.
• The Circadian component of sleep comes
from periodic signals choreographed by the
Super Chiasmatic Nucleus in the brain
(Choudhary et al., 2016).
• sleeplessness is particularly burdensome on
the prefrontal cortex of the brain and the
activities it controls (J. A. Horne, 1993).
“Types of Cortical Areas.” Wikipedia Commons, OpenStax
College,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1604_Types_of_C
ortical_Areas-02.jpg.
Goals
• Circadia is intended to gather data from
people with varying sleep habits,
pathologies, and ages.
• Data gathered from this app could then
be extended to questions beyond that of
sleep deprivation.
• These analyses would be correlations,
not causative. These types of analyses
are often used as a starting point, a
hypothesis generator.
• Analyses based on data from Circadia
could be used by industry leaders and
policy makers to guide regulation for
fields that depend on quick reaction
time, sound decision making, and
working memory.
Experiments
and
Methods
5 php pages linearly accessed,
that call JS and php functions
Experiments and
Methods
• Session id is assigned to every user of the site
• Data only submitted to db if the session id is
not present.
• These precautions necessary so final data
analysis isn’t biased
Results
• Results can be obtained on a local
machine. Data was collected for
one team member after a
“sleepless” and a normal (8hr) sleep
night.
• 3 trials, single participant for both
sleep conditions.
Discussion
• Trials do not reflect the intended use case for
Circadia (meant for large-scale collection, no
user repeats)
• A paired t test (n=3) on rxn time marginally
fails to reject null (p=0.057)
• Memory test results also recorded, no
change observed.
Taheri, M., & Arabameri, E. (2012). The Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Choice
Reaction Time and Anaerobic Power of College Student Athletes. Asian Journal of
Sports Medicine, 3(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.5812/ASJSM.34719