Assessment and Monitoring of Sleep in the Intensive Care Unit.

Sleep affects physiologic and psychological recovery throughout critical illness. Patients often describe poor sleep as a major source of distress while hospitalized in an intensive care unit. The intensive care unit environment poses unique challenges for sleep assessment and monitoring. The purpose of this literature review is to discuss methods of assessment and monitoring of sleep within the intensive care unit setting. The advantages and disadvantages of physiologic monitoring of sleep (eg, polysomnography, bispectral index, and actigraphy) are compared with those of subjective measures of sleep quality (eg, validated patient-oriented sleep questionnaires, and informal nursing assessments).