Government-backed research is examining whether anonymised sleep app data can help identify earlier trends in respiratory disease in England
New research supported by the UK government is examining whether anonymised sleep data, like changes in breathing patterns and sleep disruption, could complement public health surveillance and improve understanding of population-level respiratory illness in England.
How the study will work
The study is set to take place over three years, analysing anonymised, privacy-preserved data collected from the Sleep Cycle app between January 2023 and January 2026, as well as data from Sleep Cycle’s Cough Radar, a public visualisation tool that shows aggregated trends in nightly coughing intensity across different regions in England.
The study will assess whether sleep app signals can provide earlier visibility into respiratory disease trends, such as flu and RSV.
Researchers will explore whether sleep-based signals, such as nighttime cough patterns, align with the UK’s current hospital admission data and surveillance indicators for early detection of rising infection rates.
This is UKHSA’s first assessment of sleep app data for national epidemiological monitoring.
Professor Steven Riley, Chief Data Officer at UKHSA, said: “As an agency, we are constantly exploring how we can use new technology, such as AI, to complement our existing surveillance systems, and this innovative partnership represents a potentially important step toward integrating novel data streams into our national health intelligence.
If successful, these insights could help us strengthen early warning systems for respiratory infections in the UK.”
Erik Jivmark, CEO of Sleep Cycle, said: “Sleep is one of the most consistent, passive windows into human health. With more than 3 billion nights across 180 countries in our library, we are excited to work with UKHSA to determine if sleep can reveal meaningful population-level signals that offer earlier visibility into respiratory trends.
Our partnership with UKHSA reflects the strength of the nocturnal-breathing data we’ve gathered, and our commitment to helping public health agencies continue to build their proactive insight capability.”
The potential of sleep data in public health surveillance
Traditional disease monitoring requires data from a range of systems, including laboratories and hospitals. This often involves collecting, processing, and analysing data from multiple sources, which can be a lengthy and resource-intensive process before actionable insights are available. In contrast, sleep data, particularly when collected passively from consumer devices, enables monitoring of health trends in near real-time. While sleep data remains largely unexplored at the population level, its potential value for future surveillance is significant, as it could provide a more timely and comprehensive understanding of community-wide health patterns.
In conducting this research, maintaining data privacy is a priority. No UKHSA data will be shared with Sleep Cycle for this study. Analysis will be conducted on UKHSA’s secure systems by a dedicated UKHSA research team, supported by data scientists and epidemiologists from both organisations.
Sleep Cycle will provide anonymised, privacy-protected insights from its own technology and user-approved data. UKHSA will compare these trends to those from its own systems. Sleep Cycle uses technology such as audio-based cough detection to monitor nighttime cough behaviour, which can then be correlated with real-world viral data.
