Write a Reply

The labeling of lights on and off

I really appreciate the community's contribution to annotation unification and rearranging the annotation into -nsrr.xml format, which greatly reduces the ambiguity of analysis.

However, when I need to know when the lights were turned on/off, I couldn't find the relevant markup in the xml, either the "light on/off" or "Beginning/end of time in bed" label. A few files in MESA and SHHS1 dataset have been checked.

Thanks for raising this issue - we have realized this is a limitation in many of our older datasets that were scored in Compumedics Profusion. That software doesn't export lights off/on information into the EDF or default XML annotations.

For some datasets, such as MESA, you can find the lights timing variables in the CSV covariate dataset (in the /datasets folder). For instance:

• https://sleepdata.org/datasets/mesa/variables/stloutp5 (lights off)
• https://sleepdata.org/datasets/mesa/variables/stlonp5 (lights on)

In SHHS, I only found lights off (https://sleepdata.org/datasets/shhs/variables/stloutp).

In the future we intend to encode lights information inside of harmonized annotation files. Until then, please use the variables in the dataset!

Hi Mrueschman, thank you once again for your support. If there is anything we can do to assist in the effort to establish a unified data standard, we would be more than happy to contribute.