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Lexicon · Updated September 24, 2026

The Sleepgenic
research vocabulary.

Terms for documenting the day, measuring the following night and stating what the observations can support. Consumer sleep signals remain estimates, with clinical boundaries explicit.

The Lexicon defines the language used in the active observation set, current method and historical reports. Wearable terms remain useful for reading response measures; current research also records food, final intake timing and activity as preceding exposures.

Score, Physiology and Context remain useful reading layers. The Context Layer now specifies documented meal, timing and activity exposures linked to the next night, with missingness and competing explanations kept visible.

Apnea–Hypopnea Index
The number of apneas and hypopneas recorded per hour of sleep during a sleep study. AHI is a clinical event-rate measure used in sleep-apnea assessment; a consumer wearable score or breathing flag is not an AHI.
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Breathing Disruption
Garmin field flagging respiratory irregularities during sleep. Two values: NONE or LOW. Under-documented by Garmin.
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Central Sleep Apnea
A sleep-related breathing disorder in which breathing repeatedly decreases or stops because respiratory drive is absent or unstable, rather than because the upper airway is obstructed. It requires clinical differentiation from obstructive apnea.
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Context Layer
The Context Layer records documented meals, final caloric timing, activity and relevant conditions on the exposure day, linked to the following sleep night while keeping missing fields and competing explanations explicit.
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Duration–Recovery Divergence
A split where sleep duration or Duration Score improves while recovery physiology worsens. The sleep window expands, but HRV, resting heart rate, sleep stress, oxygenation, architecture, or Recovery Score shows that recovery remains incomplete.
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Excessive Daytime Sleepiness
A tendency to become unusually sleepy or doze during waking activities. It is a symptom with multiple possible causes, not a diagnosis and not the same as simply feeling fatigued.
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Home Sleep Apnea Test
A clinically selected home test that records a limited set of respiratory signals to evaluate suspected obstructive sleep apnea in appropriate adults. It is not the same as a consumer smartwatch or ring.
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HRV
Heart rate variability — the variation in time between heartbeats. Measured nocturnally during stable sleep stages.
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Latent Strain
An interpretive label for repeated disagreement between a stable composite sleep score and weaker source-reported sleep signals. It does not diagnose strain, predict deterioration or establish the reason for a stage estimate changing.
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Obstructive Sleep Apnea
A sleep-related breathing disorder in which the upper airway repeatedly narrows or closes during sleep despite continued respiratory effort. Screening tools and wearables can indicate risk or patterns, but diagnosis requires appropriate clinical testing.
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Physiology Layer
The Physiology Layer is what the body appears to be doing underneath the wearable score.
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Polysomnography
An attended sleep study that records multiple physiological channels—including brain activity, eye movements, muscle activity, breathing, oxygen, and heart rhythm—to evaluate sleep stages and sleep disorders.
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Recovery Trajectory
A multi-night interpretive sequence examining sleep before, immediately after, and approximately two nights after a defined high-load exposure. Canonical v1 can align these dates but does not yet publish Recovery Trajectory as a standalone calculated metric.
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REM Sleep
The sleep stage associated with vivid dreaming, memory processing, and high brain activity. Consumer wearables estimate REM indirectly; Sleepgenic interprets its nightly value and percentage against Mike's own longitudinal baseline rather than treating one reading as clinical measurement.
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Score Layer
The Score Layer is what the wearable reports: the visible number, grade, or metric generated by the device.
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Sleep Score
Garmin's overall sleep quality rating, ranging 0 to 100. A composite of quality, recovery, and duration sub-scores.
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Sleep Screening Instrument
A validated questionnaire or structured tool used to estimate symptoms, burden, or risk within a defined sleep domain. A screening result organizes the next question; it does not independently diagnose a sleep disorder.
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Sleep-Stage Classification Error
The difference between a device’s assigned sleep stage and the stage assigned by a reference method such as polysomnography. Its direction and size vary by device, algorithm, population, stage, and night.
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Supercompensation
A training-physiology framework in which performance can rebound above an earlier level after sufficient load and recovery. In Sleepgenic, a wearable-score rebound may be consistent with this pattern but cannot establish supercompensation by itself.
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Cross-Property · TrailGenic Sleep Research