Evaluation of Pressure Bed Sensor for Automatic SAHS Screening

We evaluate the performance of an unobtrusive sleep monitoring system in the detection of the sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome (SAHS). The proposed system is a pressure bed sensor (PBS) that incorporates multiple pressure sensors into a bed mattress to measure several physiological signals of the sleeping subject: respiration; heart rate; and body movements. An automatic algorithm is developed to calculate a respiratory event index (REI). The recordings of 24 patients with suspected sleep problems are analyzed, and the results are compared with the gold standard methods; first with manual scoring of polysomnography to calculate the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), and second with automatic detection of REI from the respiratory inductive plethysmography belts. The correlation coefficient between AHI and REI from PBS is up to 0.93. Evaluating the ability of PBS in the diagnosis of pathologic (AHI ≥ 5) and nonpathologic (AHI <5) subjects, we obtained a sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 100%, 92%, and 96%, respectively. To diagnose three levels of SAHS, mild, moderate, and severe, the Cohen's kappa value is 0.76. These findings support that PBS recording could provide a simple and unobtrusive method for detection of SAHS in home monitoring.