Sleep monitoring to improve the sleep of citizens with dementia

Residents of nursing homes with cognitive disorders such as dementia can have difficulty with getting a long and undisturbed night’s sleep. A new project, led by Aarhus Municipality, will try to remedy this, so citizens with dementia can have more energy in their everyday lives.

Citizens who suffer from diseases and disorders like dementia can have a hard time telling caretakers if they suffer from poor and disrupted sleep. This can lead to long periods where they get up several times a night and a general level of restlessness. This problem needs to be solved, so that nursing home residents can get a good and healthy night’s sleep – eventually resulting in more energy during daytime. Therefore, Aarhus Municipality is now taking the lead in a new project in collaboration with several other Nordic municipalities. The project is organized under the Nordic Smart City Network and funded by Nordic Innovation.

The new project is based on the danish project “Better sleep with technology”, of which Aarhus Municipality was a part of in the period 2018 to 2020. Here it turned out that the sleep of residents in nursing homes could be improved with the help of technology that collects data on resident’s sleep and physical activity. The data gave employees the opportunity to intervene and get citizens back to bed, which ultimately results in more energy for the citizens in the daytime, and thus a higher quality of life.

”The entire goal of this project is to strengthen the sleep of residents with cognitive disorders so that they can have an improved quality of life. When a resident only gets a few hours of sleep at night, they don’t have any energy for the daytime. We must change this, and therefore we’re now starting the development of technology, that can give us the necessary data for just this,” says Søren Holm Pallesen, project manager from Aarhus Municipality and front man on the sleep monitoring project.

Data security in focus

In the previous project, it was found that there was a lack of sleep monitoring technology that meets the requirements for data security. It is here new technology is needed. For developing this Aarhus Municipality has entered a collaboration with the two businesses Amplex and Develco Products.

”The actual technology for monitoring sleep isn’t new, but it can be improved and adapted to the specific needs of nursing homes. Also, we will have to be absolutely sure that the technology meets the requirements for data security,” says Søren Holm Pallesen.

In addition to Aarhus Municipality, Forum Virium Helsinki, Copenhagen Municipality, Syddjurs Municipality and Torshavn are part of the project.