A common smartphone metric may be brain health’s next frontier
A common smartphone metric may be brain health’s next frontier
- June 25, 2026
- Sara Mednick, cognitive sciences, shares expertise with Medscape
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Memory researcher Sara Mednick, PhD, had been chasing a mysterious signal for years when she came across a paper that changed everything. As a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, Mednick had been studying how the brain creates memories during sleep. …In 2016, she reported that autonomic activity — as measured by heart rate variability (HRV), the variation in time between heartbeats — enhances brain plasticity during REM sleep, improving memory consolidation. … If the right algorithm applied to a smartwatch could pick up the very low frequency HRV range, it could potentially provide consumers with a measure of glymphatic clearance — right from their smartphones, Mednick said.
For the full story, please visit Medscape.
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