Spout is an open-source Ruby tool that helps the National Sleep Research Resource team curate, manage, and version-control data dictionaries that describe underlying datasets on the site. These data dictionaries provide metadata about the variables (columns) within a dataset. A well-defined data dictionary is an essential tool for researchers who want to understand and analyze a given dataset. Background The NSRR team started development on Spout in 2013. Version 1.0. Keep reading
Do you do statistics programming using R? Do you wish you could download files from the NSRR without going through the process of installing Ruby? Well, John Muschelli and Ciprian Crainiceanu sure think so. John and Ciprian created an open-source "R" implementation of the NSRR downloader that is available for download on CRAN, https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/nsrr/index.html. Keep reading
We are happy to announce the release of the One Year of Actigraphy (OYA) dataset on the National Sleep Research Resource. This is a unique personal project undertaken by a researcher dedicated to sleep science. The purpose of the project is to make a year's worth of one person's actigraphy data available to the research community in the spirit of promoting the creation of new methods for sleep and circadian data analysis. Keep reading
Earlier this week we deposited data from the Apnea, Bariatric surgery, and CPAP (ABC) study in the National Sleep Research Resource. ABC aimed to assess the role of bariatric (weight loss) surgery as compared to continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy plus weight loss counseling for the treatment of patients with class II obesity and those who have severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Keep reading
We've recently pushed an update to the NSRR that drops support for versions v0.1.0, v0.1.1, and v0.2.0 of the NSRR gem. Version v0.2.0 was released on May 29, 2015 and many users have already updated to the newer v0.3.0 and v0.4.0 releases. If you are using one of these older releases you will need to update using following instructions. Keep reading
We're happy to announce the publication of "The National Sleep Research Resource: towards a sleep data commons" in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). The paper is available online for open access here: https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocy064 For researchers publishing on data on the NSRR, you can now add the following citation as well: Zhang GQ, Cui L, Mueller R, Tao S, Kim M, Rueschman M, Mariani S, Mobley D, Redline S. Keep reading
I am pleased to announce that data from the Home Positive Airway Pressure (HomePAP) study are now available. HomePAP took place between 2008 and 2010; it was a project in which 373 subjects at risk for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) were randomized to either a laboratory-based or home-based pathway for diagnosis and (if necessary) titration. Keep reading
The next seminar of the Complex Signals Core will be held on Thursday, March 9th, at 3 pm in the Zinner Breakout Room, at 70 Francis Street. Dr. Shaun Purcell, PhD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School) will give the following talk: “Phenotyping sleep” The talk will be followed by a round-table discussion. Keep reading
The NSRR is a community-driven repository, which can be leveraged as a platform for presenting novel tools and work in progress to the scientific community by making them available in open source format. Open access software benefits research teams in terms of visibility and feedback for their work, and the greater scientific community in terms of sharing ideas and speeding up new discoveries and development of more and more sophisticated tools. Keep reading
Today, we launched a series of tutorials for researchers interested in learning how to download and manipulate files programatically. For teachers, the tutorials are a great place to start with your students, and we encourage you to create and contribute your own tutorials and assignments on the site. We've also created a supporting Learn dataset that has publicly available files referenced by these tutorials. Keep reading