ReviewJournal of sleep research2021
Actigraphy in sleep research with infants and young children: Current practices and future benefits of standardized reporting.
Review in Journal of sleep research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 72 citations in OpenAlex.
- Wearable-Sensor-Based Physical Activity and Sleep in Children with Down Syndrome Aged 0-5 Years: A Systematic Review.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Pooled it
- Adherence to Actigraphic Devices in Elementary School-Aged Children: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Pooled it
- The Validity, Reliability, and Feasibility of Measurement Tools Used to Assess Sleep of Pre-school Aged Children: A Systematic Rapid Review.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2021Pooled it
- Effects of caffeine therapy for apnea of prematurity on sleep and neurodevelopment of preterm infants at 6 months of corrected age.Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine · 2023Trial
- Assessing infants' sleep in the home setting: designing rational study approaches.Pediatric research · 2026Review
- Assessing infant sleep quality and arousals: comparison of wearable data with parent perspectives.Pediatric research · 2026Article
- Longitudinal Infant Sleep Monitoring Using a Sensor-Enabled Responsive Bassinet: A Population-Scale Feasibility Study.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Fecal melatonin as a biomarker of emerging circadian maturity and gut microbiota in infancy.Npj biological timing and sleep · 2026Article
- Sleep disorders in children with Smith-Magenis Syndrome - a neurodevelopmental disorder with sleep-wake-rhythm-dysfunction - recommendations for pediatricians.Sleep & breathing = Schlaf & Atmung · 2026Review
- Performance of an automated sleep scoring approach for actigraphy data in children and adolescents.Sleep · 2026Article
- Capturing typical toddler sleep in context: A videosomnography study.Sleep health · 2026Article
- Linking gut microbiota rhythmicity to circadian maturation in infants.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Reporting of Accelerometry in Health Research: A Scoping Review of Current Guidance.Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports · 2025Article
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- Article
- Effects of Using a Smart Bassinet on the Mental Health of Military-Affiliated Pregnant Women: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Sleep Health and Mood in Newly Expectant Military Mothers (SHINE) Trial.JMIR research protocols · 2025Article
- Maturation of infant sleep during the first 6 months of life: a mini-scoping review.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Review
- Preschool attention and sleep support (PASS): protocol for a pilot feasibility randomized clinical trial.Frontiers in sleep · 2025Article
- Sleep quality in children with hepatic glycogen storage diseases, a prospective observational pilot study.JIMD reports · 2025Article
- Navigating the complex link between infant sleep and development: feels like decoding the Escher labyrinth.Sleep · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Actigraphy is a cost-efficient method to estimate sleep-wake patterns over long periods in natural settings. However, the lack of methodological standards in actigraphy research complicates the generalization of outcomes. A rapidly growing methodological diversity is visible in the field, which increasingly necessitates the detailed reporting of methodology. We address this problem and evaluate the current state of the art and recent methodological developments in actigraphy reporting with a special focus on infants and young children. Through a systematic literature search on PubMed (keywords: sleep, actigraphy, child *, preschool, children, infant), we identified 126 recent articles (published since 2012), which were classified and evaluated for reporting of actigraphy. Results show that all studies report on the number of days/nights the actigraph was worn. Reporting was good with respect to device model, placement and sleep diary, whereas reporting was worse for epoch length, algorithm, artefact identification, data loss and definition of variables. In the studies with infants only (n = 58), the majority of articles (62.1%) reported a recording of actigraphy that was continuous across 24 hr. Of these, 23 articles (63.9%) analysed the continuous 24-hr data and merely a fifth used actigraphy to quantify daytime sleep. In comparison with an evaluation in 2012, we observed small improvements in reporting of actigraphy methodology. We propose stricter adherence to standards in reporting methodology in order to streamline actigraphy research with infants and young children, to improve comparability and to facilitate big data ventures in the sleep community.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.