EEG Sonification improves sleep staging performance in novice stagers

Sleep staging is a critical tool used in research and clinical settings to evaluate and diagnose sleep conditions; however, sleep staging is labor intensive and may be challenging for inexperienced practitioners. We explored whether adding an auditory representation (sonification) of the EEG to a standard visual representation could improve sleep staging performance or reduce workload. This is the first study to investigate the effects of sonification on sleep staging performance. We performed a within-subjects study in which 40 participants completed an online sleep staging task with and without sonified EEG. EEG was sonified by minimal transformation in which the raw EEG signal was played as an audio signal. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found adding sonification did not result in improvements in accuracy, speed, or workload for the entire subject group. However, when we stratified participants by sleep staging experience, we found sonification improved accuracy for the least experienced participants. These findings suggest EEG sonification may be useful as a tool to enable novice sleep stagers to reach acceptable performance levels faster.