Case study · Clinical research
UCSF Sleep Diary
A sleep research and clinical tool for study participants.
- Client
- UCSF
- Service
- Design and development
- Sector
- Clinical research
- Access
- Enrolled participants only
At a glance
How it collects
An evening assessment and a morning one, which is what makes a sleep record usable rather than remembered.
Symptoms and behaviours captured across the length of a study, not at a single visit.
Only participants enrolled in the associated research studies can use it.
Participants can see their own record, which is what sustains a daily protocol.
The brief
Sleep is the hardest thing to ask someone to remember
Sleep research depends on data that the participant is, by definition, not conscious for. What is left is what they can report either side of it — how they felt going to bed, how the night went, how they woke.
Recall degrades fast, and it degrades in patterns that bias a study. Ask at a clinic visit three weeks later and you get an average of an impression. The data has to be captured at the moment, twice a day, by someone who is either about to sleep or has just woken up — which is the least cooperative moment in anyone's day.
Captured either side of the night, because nobody can accurately remember a fortnight of sleep.
The build
Restricted access is a research requirement
The app is not a consumer sleep tracker and deliberately does not behave like one. Access is restricted to participants enrolled in the associated research studies, which is a methodological requirement rather than a licensing one: a study population that anyone can join is not a study population.
Everything else follows from a single constraint, that the participant is completing this at their least cooperative moment. Two short assessments, a visible record, no configuration. The same reasoning underpins the Brighten instrument built for UCSF and the University of Washington, where the enemy of a long study is always the participant's ordinary day.
Wow Labz delivered design and development.
What it does
Two moments, one record
Evening and morning assessments
The two entries that bracket a night. Separating them is what lets a study distinguish how someone went to bed from how they slept.
A calendar of the study
Participants see their own history, which both sustains the daily habit and makes a missed entry visible rather than invisible.
A summary view
The participant's own record, summarised. In a long study that is the thing that makes daily reporting feel like it is going somewhere.
Stack
What it was built with
Questions
The Sleep Diary, answered
What is the UCSF Sleep Diary?
A sleep research and clinical tool that collects information about a participant's sleep related symptoms and behaviours across the course of a study. Wow Labz designed and developed it for UCSF.
Who can use it?
Only participants enrolled in the associated research studies. Access is restricted, which is a methodological requirement rather than a commercial one.
Why two assessments a day?
Because a night has to be bracketed. An evening assessment and a morning one let a study separate how a participant went to bed from how they actually slept, and both are captured at the moment rather than recalled at a later visit.
How does it relate to Brighten?
Both are UCSF research instruments Wow Labz built, and both are designed around the same problem: study burden is what erodes retention, so the daily protocol has to survive an ordinary bad day.
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