Empatica Actigraphy: The new standard to measure sleep and physical activity

As we continue our work to provide clinicians and researchers with the most reliable and accurate digital health measurements, we are excited to introduce Empatica’s new Actigraphy offering, which premiered at the 75th American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting.

It is a powerful addition to the FDA-cleared Empatica Health Monitoring Platform, which expands its data and hardware capabilities, and makes it the perfect tool for sleep and activity studies, arriving at an important moment following the recent retirement of the Philips Actiwatch.

In 2007, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recognized actigraphy as reliable and valid for detecting sleep in healthy adult populations and in patients with sleep disorders. Since then, Actigraphy has established itself as a valuable, validated, and cost-effective approach to collect data from patients and participants using accelerometry data, and has become one of the most widespread digital measurement areas in clinical research. Hundreds of clinical trials are employing actigraphy endpoints today, with applications across various therapeutic areas, from neurology to oncology.

As we continue our work to provide clinicians and researchers with the most reliable and accurate digital health measurements, we are excited to introduce Empatica’s new Actigraphy offering, which premiered at the 75th American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting. It is a powerful addition to the FDA-cleared Empatica Health Monitoring Platform, which expands its data and hardware capabilities, and makes it the perfect tool for sleep and activity studies, arriving at an important moment following the recent retirement of the Philips Actiwatch.

How Empatica Actigraphy works

With Empatica Actigraphy, we are adding over 20 new sleep and activity measures to the Empatica Health Monitoring Platform, along with the capability to collect data continuously for up to 14 days on a single charge.

Empatica Actigraphy comes with two distinct sensor modes for EmbracePlus, our advanced smartwatch for continuous health monitoring: Actigraphy Pro and Actigraphy Optimized. Sensor modes are hardware configurations for EmbracePlus that modify its sensor capabilities to fit the needs of specific studies and research areas, maximizing the input needed from specific sensors to make it a data collection powerhouse tailored to a specific study context.

The Actigraphy sensor modes have been specifically developed to suit the needs of sleep and activity-related studies, focusing on the collection of accelerometry data and extending the battery life of EmbracePlus to up to 14 days. These hardware configurations are designed to tackle commonly faced challenges in clinical research and lower the burden of the patient experience, to improve compliance and participation while generating meaningful data over extended time periods.

The Actigraphy Pro sensor mode uses the EmbracePlus 3-axis accelerometer at a 64Hz sampling rate, alongside data from the device’s EDA and temperature sensors, for additional metrics. The Actigraphy Optimized sensor mode focuses on collecting accelerometry data, and uses the EmbracePlus accelerometer at a 32Hz sampling rate, while extending the EmbracePlus battery life to 14 days. All Empatica Actigraphy measures are available with both sensor modes for our Enterprise clients.

Data collection and transfer take place via the Empatica Health Monitoring Platform. EmbracePlus can be comfortably worn by trial participants, continuously capturing data and transferring it to the companion Care App via Bluetooth. In case of disconnections, the onboard memory of EmbracePlus prevents any data loss. The Care App streams all data via the phone’s internet connection to the Empatica Cloud, while it also locally stores data in case the phone is not connected to the internet. Once on the Empatica Cloud, data can be downloaded for further analysis, or visualized via the Care Portal.

With Empatica, clinical trial managers can also choose to provide participants with compatible phones provisioned by Empatica, reducing setup times and ensuring a smoother experience for patients and sites.

Actigraphy measures and digital biomarkers

Our Actigraphy measures provide a combination of raw data, daily reports, and digital biomarkers that have been developed using Empatica-validated and open-source algorithms, across ten key areas:

• Raw Accelerometry
• Sleep Analysis
• Activity Classification
• Activity Intensity
• Body position
• Gait (Step Count)
• Sleep Detection
• Activity Counts
• Wearing Detection
• Energy Expenditure

Within each category, there is a range of digital biomarkers and daily summary reports, including Total Sleep Time, Sleep Efficiency, Sleep fragmentation, Distance, Wake After Sleep Onset, Locomotion, and Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activity (MVPA). Talk to our team to discover our full offering of digital actigraphy measures.

Additional visualizations of Sleep and Steps inside the Care Portal enable clinical trial staff to easily review participant data across different timeframes and derive insights.

A single, scalable solution for your clinical trials

Our goal when designing EmbracePlus and developing our Platform was to ensure that clinical researchers had scalable access to all the patient and participant data they needed from a single solution. That is why we equipped EmbracePlus with five sensors, and why, through our Cloud-based Platform, we allow the simultaneous monitoring of thousands of participants across studies and sites.

Thanks to the unique sensor combination of EmbracePlus (PPG, EDA, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, and Skin Thermometer), you can use the Empatica Health Monitoring Platform both for your actigraphy research and in other investigations. The scalability of the Platform can reduce the long-term training time and procurement efforts required to implement in your workflow and processes, making it a unique data collection tool for multiple applications.

Visit our webpage or reach out to our team to discover more about Empatica Actigraphy.

The Empatica Health Monitoring Platform has been cleared for continuous data collection to monitor blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) during rest, peripheral skin temperature, activity associated with movement during sleep, and Electrodermal Activity (EDA)