QCycle: Participant-Led Research Ovulatory Cycle Tracking

Hi All,

This project log is where we’ll post questions about logistics, curious things we see in our data, maybe even visualizations. It’s your way to publicly talk to each other as well as to me, without having to keep slack or hangouts open all the time.

As we’re all actively taking part in the development of Participant-Led Research as a method, this will end up being valuable documentation to us at the end of the project. So please do post here!

I’ll plan on checking back here frequently to answer questions.

P.S. Don’t know what QCycle is? Just ask! I’ll post a project breakdown soon.

Cheers,
Azure Grant

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Very curious tracking my sleep patterns as a night owl. What’s the difference between deep sleep and light sleep? My hunch is deep sleep correlats with true dark, I seemed to stop entering it once the Sun came up. I actually feel pretty well rested tho

Hey Shara – you’re right in that deep sleep is more likely to occur earlier in the night when we are sleeping normally. REM sleep normally occurs more in the latter half of our sleep bout (in the morning). This doesn’t necessarily accord with whether or not the sun is up in everyone - but it may well in you!

Remember to scroll down in the sleep page and look at your heart rate cycles – their shape and consistency of cycle can correlate well with subjective sleep quality in my and my fiance’s experience. Also go to the readiness page and scroll down to see your overnight HRV!

Also remember that the Oura ring isn’t a perfect sleep-stage scorer by any means, so take their estimation with a grain of salt. This paper, “The Sleep of the Ring” is open source so you can read it - and compares oura to polysomnography (the ‘‘gold standard’’ for sleep staging where a trained technician looks over electrical brain and eye movement activity by hand – or now a days, employs software to help them do so more efficiently). It’s important to remember that this “gold standard” isn’t perfect-- different technicians I believe will score things a little differently, though the exact number on % differences reported i don’t know.

The study basically says that Oura is 1) quite good at detecting wake vs. sleep 2) overestimates rem and underestimates deep sleep a little. Below is a screenshot of a table from the paper showing discrepancies between Oura and the polysomnograph for the 41 people in the study.

I highly recommend reading through this to learn a little more about the performance of the device :slight_smile:

As usual let me know if you have more questions and thank you for posting this here!

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Possibly I have sleep dysfunction but for me oura shows an overabundance of REM sleep and lack of deep sleep.
I learned from oura support that ring tightness can be an issue and this is disturbing because my ring fit changes during my cycle. I try changing fingers to prevent this. I suppose this is working because the first week I had oura ring my sleep was in the 0-5 min range.
I then started to postulate that my deep sleep was correlated with exercise, until my best deep sleep day (that finally was over an hour) was on one of my inactive days but right after I tested positive for LH surge. Does this mean ovulation functioned as exercise in my body?
Upon looking at your sleep cycle, I realize that one wouldn’t see any of these correlations. I am waiting for a beddr device which measures spo2 also and perhaps gives a different picture of my sleep. https://www.beddrsleep.com
Azure also sent me a paper that suggested people with PCOS have sleep dysfunction.

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