Algorithms

Roelof Hut (RuG)

Assessment of human behaviour and physiology, under ambulant conditions, to determine ones personal circadian phase, is essential for any chronobiological approach to improvement of health and well-being. Without this measure, personal phase adjustment protocols for social jet-lag reduction, shift work schedule modification, and chronotherapy will be impossible. Masking plagues most datasets, a problem which could be ‘solved’ given enough data to work with. However, until now, the high cost of measuring devices has unfortunately precluded the opportunity to solve this problem. In ONTIME, we will be generating novel, complex datasets describing various behavioural and physiological parameters. Furthermore, our inexpensive devices mean that we will get such information from an unprecedented number of subjects. Here, we take a fresh look at the problem of analysing ambulant circadian behaviour. Partial analysis algorithms will be optimized for ‘on board’ data compression to maximize power efficiency and speed of the newly developed recording devices under project devices.

This project aims to produce comprehensive analysis methods and software packages to objectively discern circadian phase, amplitude, and consolidation for different physiological and behavioural parameters measured with devices developed in project devices which collect multiday recordings of activity, position, skin temperature, heart rate, light environment and EEG. Additional parameters will be added with developing technologies. The innovative strength of this program will be that fundamental scientific knowledge will be used to combine different relevant physiological parameters to estimate internal circadian phase.