If you are interested in the non-pharmacological treatment of insomnia, an interesting item ran in the NY Times this week: “How Exercise Can Help Us Sleep Better.”
A clinical study of sleep and exercise
Implications for the practice of geriatrics and general medicine
What tech solutions might help?
- Log sleep and exercise. Ideally, with as little hassle as possible. Collecting this data can be helpful to clinician and caregiver when they meet to follow-up on a plan to increase exercise, decrease stress, and improve sleep.
- In some cases following data in real-time might help people maintain a behavior or technique (such as in biofeedback).
- Whether caregivers would find it helpful on a daily basis to see how much they’d slept every night is unclear to me; it could potentially be stressful to not see sleep improving as quickly as one wants it to.
- Provide reminders and support to help caregivers maintain the exercise habit. There must be some way to leverage technology to help caregivers (or any patient/person) maintain an exercise habit, but I’m not sure which would work the best for the caregivers I work with.
- In fact, the multiple options available (there are so many apps/services available to help people meet fitness goals!) is a problem: making a choice is difficult!
- Caregivers and patients would probably appreciate and value a recommendation from clinicians, but it might be hard for clinicians to make a recommendation unless it’s a product the clinician has already tried for him/herself.
- We may also see companies aggressively market themselves to doctors, in hopes that their fitness app will be “prescribed.” I have mixed feelings about this since historically when business markets to doctors, the patients are not always well-served by the results.