Standardizing wearable sleep data for clinical, research, and public health use: A World Sleep Society specification

Consumer health trackers (CHTs) capable of estimating sleep have become widely adopted and are increasingly used by individuals, researchers, and healthcare professionals to characterize habitual sleep patterns and their relationship to health. Although many manufacturers report similarly named sleep measures, these are often defined, computed, and represented differently across the industry, hindering interpretation. Population reference values, risk thresholds, and outcome associations can only be established reliably when measurements are standardized to represent the same underlying constructs. To address this standardization gap, a multidisciplinary working group comprising academic and industry experts developed a minimum viable standard, specifying a common semantic framework for Fundamental Sleep Measures generated by CHTs. The proposed specification balances scientific rigor, clinical utility, and practical implementation while accommodating proprietary algorithms and user interfaces. By standardizing backend data semantics rather than frontend product implementation, the framework enables interoperability across manufacturers without constraining innovation and product differentiation. The standard specifies metadata, provenance, quality indicators, and circumstances in which wearable-derived sleep measures should be interpreted with greater caution. It provides the technical foundation for consistent integration of CHT sleep data into electronic health records, digital health platforms, and population health systems.