Examination of non-restrictive and non-invasive sleep evaluation technique for children using difference images

In recent years, the inappropriate sleep style for children has become known as one of the important causes of behavioral disorders, for example inattentiveness during waking hours or hyperactivity. Consequently, screening for the children having sleep disorders is needed to treat in the early stage of the behavioral disorders. From the point of view of evaluation for children´s sleep, there are three problems. First, the conventional polysomnogram (PSG) requires great investment in facility and high personnel cost so that hospitals equipped with the PSG examination are rare. Next, the sleep-check examination system such as PSG and so on requires many sensors to be attached to the client´s face and body. So the client feels suffering severe stress and the wires of sensors trigger some accidents. At last, it is very difficult to get ordinary sleep style in the sleep examination room because of above factors. It is strongly desirable to develop a new method of sleep evaluation system in place of conventional PSG that is non-restrictive and non-contact. Taking these problems into account, we devised a technique with these characteristics that is completely separated from sensors. It determines the sleep condition from body movement information by measuring movements using difference processing of video image. Our study of using this technique on pediatric patients indicated that this non-restrictive technique could be effective for evaluating body movement during sleep. It was looked for a relationship between movements information and sleep conditions.