Professor Rachael Taylor will be presenting the PhD work of Bradley Brosnan, PhD supervisors: Professor Rachael Taylor, Professor Barbara Galland, Associate Professor Kim Meredith-Jones, Associate Professor Jill Haszard.

Do you really need to put that device down before bed to ensure a good night’s kip?

Current sleep guidelines recommend that adolescents not use digital devices in the hour before bed to ensure good sleep health. However, the research on which these recommendations are based is mostly cross-sectional (and thus cannot determine causality), based on questionnaires (which likely do not assess true screen usage), and often assess day-time screen use rather than that occurring just before bed (which is thought to be more detrimental to sleep).

In the Bedtime Electronic Devices (BED) study, 85 teenagers wore police body cameras to objectively measure their screen time in the hours before bed on four evenings. A second infrared camera was placed in their bedroom to record screen use in bed and overnight. Sleep was also measured objectively using actigraphy.

This talk will describe how teenagers really use their screens in the evening, and determine whether screen time before bed is really that bad. All University of Otago and Te Whatu Ora staff and students are welcome to attend.