EEG – based study on sleep quality improvement by using music

Abstract

Napping is essential for human to reduce drowsiness, contribute to improving cognitive function, reflex, short-term memory, and state. Some studies have shown that a certain amount of time for a nap can boost the body's immunity and reduce the danger of cardiovascular disease. Using music for relaxation and enjoyment to fall asleep is an effective solution that earlier studies have shown. There are many genres of music that have been used for stimulation, such as binaural beats or melodic sounds. The aim of the study was to confirm the positive effect of music on sleep quality by analyzing electroencephalography signal. There were four types of music is being used in this study: instrumental music, Ballad music, K-pop music, and Jazz. The study applied the pre-processing include filtering block, features extraction, and clustering steps to analyze raw data. This research calculated the power spectrum of Alpha wave and Theta wave, to detect the transition of wake - sleep stages by K-means clustering algorithm. Sleep latency is one of the factors that determine the quality of sleep. The sleep onset is detected based on the phase shift of the Alpha and Theta waves. The exact timing of the sleep onset was important in this study. The user interface was developed in this study to compute sleep latency in normal and musical experiment. As a result, music is an intervention in helping people fall asleep easier (mean of sleep latency in normal and musical experiment was 9.0714 min and 5.6423 min, respectively) but the standard deviation of this result was rather high due to the little number of experiments. However, the study concludes that listening to music before naptime can improve sleep latency in some participants.