Pervasive detection of sleep apnea using medical wireless sensor networks

The sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterized by cessation of respiratory flow (apnea) or a reduction in the flow (hypopnea). This disorder is often invalidating and may in some cases lead to death. During the night, symptoms can include nocturnal choking, heavy snoring, sweating, restless sleep, impotence, and witnessed apnea. As the sleep centers for apnea detection are usually overloaded and inaccessible, an automatic apnea detection algorithm for portable devices is required for in-home detection. In this paper, we propose a lightweight approach for pervasive detection of sleep apnea using Wireless Sensor Networks. The experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves good detection accuracy with low delay and low false alarm rate.