Simon Squire Smith

Background: Sleep is a key public health issue, but insufficient or poor-quality sleep has traditionally been viewed as an individual health problem, with interventions targeted accordingly. A broader socioecological perspective suggests that sleep health is influenced by interacting individual, social, and societal-level factors. This exploratory study examines the prevalence and correlates of insufficient sleep, sleep disturbance, and napping within a socioecological framework, using a nationally representative sample of Australian households. Methods: Data from 17,570 people aged over 15 from Wave 17 (2017) of the nationally representative Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey were used. Cross-sectional associations between a range of self-reported individual, sociodemographic, social, and societal-level factors with sleep outcomes (i.e., insufficient sleep duration, sleep disturbance, and napping) were examined using multiple logistic regression models. Results: Eighteen percent of participants had insufficient sleep according to age-based guidelines, 20% met criteria for sleep disturbance, and 30% napped at least weekly. While most significant correlates of the sleep outcomes were individual-level health behaviour and functioning factors, several social and societal-level correlates were also identified. These include marital status, living with young children, geography, relative neighbourhood socioeconomic position, and housing tenure status. Each was significantly associated with at least one sleep outcome. Conclusion: These findings suggest that both individual and socio-environmental contextual factors influence sleep health, indicating potential for multi-level intervention strategies.

Limb movement is an important component of control during safety-critical tasks such as driving. Restricted movement, such as limitations associated with an injury or surgery to the upper limb, may impact driving safety. However, the degree of upper limb movement required for driving is not well described outside of traditional laboratory settings. There is a need for new affordable, accessible, reliable and accurate measures of normative limb movement to guide decisions about driving capacity. This feasibility study applied a volume estimation approach to wrist-worn triaxial accelerometry data to quantify upper limb movement during naturalistic driving in a young adult population. A sample of 89 participants wore accelerometers while engaging in daily driving activity over a two-week period. Results demonstrated a distribution of movement volumes, consistent with variation in individual driving behaviour. This volume estimation approach has strong potential for further development as both a research tool and clinical assessment method, particularly in rehabilitation and return-to-driving assessments following upper limb injury or surgery.

Background: Poor sleep has been associated with mental health concerns such as anxiety and depression. Prior evidence suggests that smartphone use may be a factor in poor sleep and mental ill‐health in young adults, though most studies have relied on self‐reported measures of smartphone use and sleep, which can be unreliable. This study used objective and subjective measures to examine the relationship between time spent using smartphones, sleep duration, quality, regularity, and symptoms of depression and anxiety in a sample of self‐selected poor sleepers. Methods: Participants ( N = 99; 70.7% female) wore an actigraph for 2 weeks to assess their habitual nightly sleep duration and regularity. Their average daily smartphone screen use was collected over 1 week with a smartphone application. Standardized questionnaires were used to assess sleep quality and mental health symptoms. Results: No statistically significant associations were found between objective smartphone screen use and any sleep or mental health variables. Sleep disturbance, sleep‐related daytime impairment, anxiety, and depression were positively correlated. However, regression models identified that only sleep‐related daytime impairment explained unique variance in anxiety and depression when adjusted for sleep disturbance and duration, gender, age, and screen time. Limitations: Specific timing of smartphone screen use (e.g., evening use) and/or application content were not collected as part of this study. Conclusions: These results conflict with prior evidence demonstrating negative relationships between self‐reported smartphone screen use, sleep, and mental health. Further research incorporating objective measurement of smartphone screen use, focusing on critical periods for sleep, may provide a more nuanced picture of this relationship. Results also demonstrate the differing roles of night‐time sleep disturbance and daytime sleep‐related impairment in mental health. Trial Registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry number: ACTRN12621000132842

Objectives: The objective of this scoping review was to explore the body of knowledge that exists on the topic of sleep in adults experiencing homelessness. Background: Sleep is essential for health and wellbeing, and has an important role in cognition, decision making and life outcomes. The experience of homelessness increases exposure to risk factors that influence poor sleep health, including social and environmental exposures. People experiencing homelessness may not have the autonomy to mitigate these environmental and social impacts. Methods: For this scoping review, we searched for English language peer‐reviewed articles in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Sociological Abstracts, Social Science Database, Australian Public Affairs Full Text and PsycINFO. Forward and backward searching of included articles was also conducted. The methodology for this scoping review was guided by the scoping review framework in the Joanna Briggs Institute Manual for Evidence Synthesis. Eligibility Criteria: Studies were included if they examined the concept of any dimension of the sleep experience (including sleep‐related daytime impairment) in adults 18 years and over experiencing homelessness in high income countries. Sources of Evidence: This review considered research‐oriented literature, including original research, reviews, meta‐analyses, practice guidelines, qualitative studies, conference abstracts, and government and nongovernment research‐oriented reports. Charting Methods: Data were extracted on publication year, research design, geographical location, participant characteristics, measurement and key findings. Findings were narratively described or presented as frequencies. A thematic analysis was also completed for qualitative research studies. Results: This review extracted data from 101 studies. Of these, 45 were quantitative, 43 were qualitative, 6 were mixed‐methods, and 7 were narrative reviews. The majority of studies included a focus on populations from the United States (56 studies), followed by the United Kingdom (18 studies). Only 34% of the included studies explicitly focussed on sleep as a core objective of the research. In the thematic analysis, the most frequently identified barriers to sleep across studies were safety and security, weather exposure and lack of comfort. Conclusions: This scoping review identified notable gaps in the literature, including a need for validated subjective and objective sleep measures for people experiencing homelessness, and a lack of research on sleep interventions in this population. Review findings can be used to stimulate and guide more targeted research, helping to identify appropriate intervention targets and approaches to improve sleep and related outcomes in this population.

Extended Reality (XR) platforms can expose users to novel attacks including embodied abuse and/or AI attacks-at-scale. The expanded attack surfaces of XR technologies may expose users of shared online platforms to psychological/social and physiological harms via embodied interactions with potentially millions of other humans or artificial humans, causing what we define as an inter-reality attack. The past 20 years have demonstrated how social and other harms (e.g., bullying, assault and stalking) can and do shift to digital social media and gaming platforms. XR technologies becoming more mainstream has led to investigations of ethical and technical consequences of these expanded input surfaces. However, there is limited literature that investigates social attacks, particularly towards vulnerable communities, and how AI technologies may accelerate generative attacks-at-scale. This article employs human-centred research methods and a harms-centred Cybersecurity framework to co-design a testbed of socio-technical attack scenarios in XR social gaming platforms. It uses speculative fiction to further extrapolate how these could reach attacks-at-scale by applying generative AI techniques. It develops an Inter-Reality Threat Model to outline how actions in virtual environments can impact on the real-world. As AI capability continues to rapidly develop, this article articulates the urgent need to consider a future where XR-AI attacks-at-scale could become commonplace.

Given the ubiquity of videogame play by children, concerns about the impacts of videogames, and increasing evidence of the benefits associated with digital play, it is important to evaluate the player experience (pX) of children. Moreover, it is essential to include children's voices in research about technologies designed for their use. However, eliciting rich, first-hand data on their experiences and perspectives is challenging because it requires children to articulate opinions in a pre-established context of general positivity towards games, alongside potential social desirability bias. In this paper, we present a methodology which uses children's psychophysiology as a prompt for reflective interviews, with two commercial off-the-shelf computer games (Rocket League and LEGO Builder's Journey). We consider the utility, reproducibility, reliability and validity of the method. In assessing the method, we discuss children's experience of wearing the sensors, the insights generated from the psychophysiological data, and the understanding that emerged when prompting children to reflect and comment on their own psychophysiological data.