Comparison between paper and electronic sleep diary

This study aimed to test the concurrent validity of an electronic version (to run on tablet) of a sleep diary derived from the core Consensus Sleep Diary compared with the traditional paper and pencil version. To this end, 15 healthy volunteers (6 males; mean age 37.20 ± 17.55 years) every morning, for at least 7 consecutive days, filled both paper and electronic sleep diary. Furthermore, sleep was objectively assessed through actigraphy. With reference to all sleep parameters examined, no significant differences were observed between paper and electronic sleep diary. As expected, paper and electronic sleep diary showed the same poor agreement with actigraphic estimates of sleep quantity and sleep quality. On the basis of the present data, we can conclude that electronic sleep diary performs like paper sleep diary. Bearing in mind that electronic sleep diary presents several benefits in comparison to the paper sleep diary (e.g. avoiding of the “parking lot syndrome”, in which patient retrospectively completes more days at the same time; reducing the time for data entry and scoring), we suggest that, if the present findings will be confirmed also in clinical populations, electronic sleep diary should replace paper sleep diary in both research and clinical settings.