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Thesis/Dissertation
Date
2025-05
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Urban Bioethics
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https://doi.org/10.34944/v6dj-ks16
Abstract
Consumer sleep technologies (CSTs) are devices ranging from smartphone apps to wearables that are used to track sleep and offer a promise of improving sleep quality. The rise in CSTs corresponds with an increase in the use of smart technologies more broadly and the growing interest in sleep and a potential sleep crisis. This growing use of CSTs creates many ethical considerations. CSTs promise to serve as a more objective way to track and improve sleep, leading some communities like the quantified self movement and biohackers to embrace CSTs for self-tracking. In this way, CSTs have contributed to increasing medicalization of sleep. Studying CSTs is challenging due to the heterogeneity around the types of CSTs that exist as well as the inability of researchers to access raw data from CSTs due to the “black box” algorithms underlying CSTs. The limited completed research shows that CSTs fall short of gold standard sleep studies, namely polysomnography (PSG). Despite this, the growth of CSTs has led to the creation of a novel data set that could be studied to better understand sleep. Widespread use of CSTs might entrench existing norms and biases around what good sleep entails and sampling biases. This personal data set also raises data privacy concerns over how the data is utilized. For all these reasons, CSTs require careful regulation and oversight to reduce false claims, protect data privacy, and prevent misuse of this inherently personal data. Claims around disease detection by CST companies should be investigated for accuracy, and government regulation should create HIPAA-inspired regulations for health data to allow for protection of data privacy along with the deletion of private health data on request.
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