Sleep research article

Toward Real-Time Circadian Phase Estimation with Low Latency from Wearable Sensing Data

2026-04-29 · arXiv: 2605.00910

Authors: Mengzhu Xu , Nemanja Cabrilo , Merel van Gilst , Jean-Paul Linnartz

One-line summary

A sleep science research article on Toward Real-Time Circadian Phase Estimation with Low Latency from Wearable Sensing Data.

Sleep health notes

Sleep health notes will be added by the Sleepatch editorial team.

中文解读

中文解读待补充:本站会优先为失眠研究、睡眠质量改善、昼夜节律等高价值睡眠研究添加中文说明。

Original abstract

Accurate estimation of the human circadian phase plays an important role in personalized health monitoring, but most existing wearable-based approaches operate retrospectively and require full circadian cycle recordings, leading to high estimation latency and substantial data and computational burden for real-time deployment on edge devices. In this study, we investigated whether circadian phase can be estimated in real time using only short historical windows of wearable data. We propose a low latency framework that estimates instantaneous circadian phase from past observations, with a cosinor-fitted core body temperature rhythm serving as the reference. Data from a free-living field study involving 14 participants were used to systematically evaluate the effects of sensor modality selection, historical window length, and model class under participant-based cross-validation. The results showed that estimation accuracy improves with increasing window length but saturates at approximately 8 hours of history. Tree-based models reached a performance plateau beyond 480 minutes, whereas sequence-based models continued to benefit from longer temporal contexts. When relying solely on light exposure and physical activity, the proposed approach achieved a mean circular mean absolute error (CMAE) of 1.19 h. These findings provide practical guidance for efficient and deployable real-time circadian phase monitoring using wearables.

5.0App value
7.0Research quality
4.0Wellness relevance

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