Towards a Greater Awareness of the Relevance of Sleep and Physical Activity for Personal Well-Being

Sleep has a critical role in health and well-being, as it is of fundamental importance for metabolic and emotional functions. Indeed, it is well known that sleep plays an active role in brain maturation, memory, learning and information processing. A lack of rest can therefore cause drowsiness, a decrease in attention and impairment in all those executive functions regulated by the prefrontal cortex. Moreover, there is evidence that sleep quality and duration are associated with better sports performance. Given the intrinsic relationship between brain plasticity and memory, which is responsible for both learning processes and long-term memory consolidation, sleep is crucial in learning new skills and tactics for both elite and practitioner athletes. In addition, quality sleep reduces the risk of injury and disease, thus optimizing also sports performance, and promoting increased participation in daily training and tasks. In this context, self-tracking devices have been introduced to encourage a greater involvement in the attention on our lifestyle and to get an optimization in terms of health, fitness and well-being. We therefore propose a brief description of a first implementation of a sleep mask capable of monitoring sleep quality through the detection of sleep phases in a non-invasive modality.