Intervention for Chronic Insufficient Sleep in Young Adult Cancer Patients and Survivors

PROJECT SUMMARY Insomnia – defined as difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or nonrestorative sleep – is often accompanied by symptoms that impair daily function such as fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and mood disturbance. Affecting up to 75% of the estimated 650,000 young adult cancer survivors in the United States, insomnia has a myriad of psychological and medical sequelae that compound late in long-term effects of cancer diagnosis and treatment, including increased risk of mortality. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) remains the gold standard for managing chronic insomnia. Nevertheless, widespread access to trained CBT-I providers, even in accredited sleep centers, remains elusive: trained CBT-I therapists remain limited in number and traditional in-person CBT-I therapy can be time and cost prohibitive for patients. Newer attempts to develop automated web-based CBT-I are more didactic than interactive and can involve counterproductive use of smartphone screens at bedtime that can be activating and suppress the melatonin needed for sleep. To address this critical gap in young adult cancer survivorship care, we propose the More Sleep Hours Electronic Education Program (More SHEEP): a CBT-I solution using a screen-free, conversational, AI-driven smart speaker, custom lighting to plan, remind and support YACS about the changes required to overcome insomnia, and a smart router to report on bedtime screen use. We propose a multi-phase project involving active patient stakeholder input and an iterative design process that will achieve the following Specific Aims: Aim 1) maximize feasibility, usability, and acceptability of the interactive CBT-I prototype; Aim 2) finalize the prototype and conduct pilot field testing of the intervention for usability; Aim 3) conduct a randomized controlled trial to determine the impact of these integrated CBT-I components on insomnia symptoms among young adult cancer survivors compared to an attention control. Successful completion of these Aims will further our long-term goal of providing novel, affordable, available, scalable, evidence-driven solutions for moderate-severe chronic insomnia among young adult cancer survivors. Furthermore, this technology can eventually be translated to other patient populations living with cancer or other serious illnesses.