What sleep can tell us: Charles Higgins at TEDxTucson

Good sleep is just as important to health as good nutrition, but while many people manage their diet, most people take sleep for granted until they start to have trouble sleeping. As we age, almost everyone starts to experience problems with sleep to varying degrees. Furthermore, virtually every psychological disorder is associated with disturbed sleep. In this talk, Professor Charles Higgins discusses the possibilities for improved human health resulting from daily monitoring of sleep with a small, portable, non-invasive sleep monitoring device. Most of the data ever collected about sleep has been done in clinical settings, an environment in which people obviously sleep less well than at home. Much less is known about normal sleep in a person's home, and especially how measures of sleep correlate with psychological problems including depression and anxiety. Professor Higgins' lab is conducting a long-term study using this sleep monitoring device of people's sleep in their own homes, and describes preliminary results of this study. Such sleep monitoring will make it possible to quantitatively measure sleep quality, and may even provide an objective way to diagnose psychological disorders, or even create a measure of general health.

Dr. Charles Higgins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience with a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering at the University of Arizona, which he joined in 1999. Though he started his career as an electrical engineer (getting his PhD from Caltech in 1993), his fascination with the natural world has led him to study insect vision and visual processing, and to try to meld together the worlds of robotics and biology. His research encompasses areas including software simulations of brain circuits, human sleep, models of cognition, and interfacing live insect brains with robots, but his driving interest continues to be building truly intelligent machines.

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