Simons Sleep Project Releases Data About Sleep Behaviors and Autism

A young girl dressed in pajamas wearing a headband and watch. — A Simons Sleep Project participant wears a headband and watch that record sleep behavior. Ilan Dinstein

Disrupted sleep is a common occurrence for those with autism, and a new project is helping discover why. The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) is pleased to announce the release of data collected from its Simons Sleep Project (SSP), a study aimed at accelerating research into sleep and daily behaviors in individuals with autism. The SSP engaged more than 100 adolescent participants with autism and their non-affected siblings and collected more than 3,000 nights’ worth of data.

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“The SSP is the first-ever study to compile sleep data from adolescents with and without autism over a long period of time,” says the study’s senior author, Ilan Dinstein, a former senior visiting research scientist at SFARI and a professor at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. “This data was collected in the participants’ own homes, helping to ensure that it captures each person’s typical sleep experience as closely as possible. It also employed several state-of-the-art technologies for recording critical sleep-related measures that may differ between individuals with and without autism.”

The study collected behavioral and neurophysiological data using specialized watches, headbands and mattress pads that measured brain activity, heart rate, skin temperature and movement. These sensors were accompanied by parent questionnaires and daily sleep diaries. A full breakdown of available data can be found on the project’s website.

A description of this large open dataset and several initial findings from SSP are outlined in a February 2025 bioRxiv preprint. These results suggest that the amount of time it takes to fall asleep (called sleep onset-latency) may be significantly longer in those with autism than those without the condition.

The team hopes the data will help reveal new insights into sleep behavior in autism. “We are excited to make this extensive dataset available to the research community to further studies of sleep behavior in autism,” says SFARI Senior Vice President and Senior Scientist John Spiro. “There are many unanswered questions that this data can help explore, and we look forward to seeing the findings it enables.”

More information about the project is available in an article from the Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research (SPARK) project.