Detection of obstructive sleep apnea through ECG signal features

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common disorder in which individuals stop breathing during their sleep. Most of sleep apnea cases are currently undiagnosed because of expenses and practicality limitations of overnight polysomnography (PSG) at sleep labs, where an expert human observer is needed to work over night. New techniques for sleep apnea classification are being developed by bioengineers for most comfortable and timely detection. In this paper, an automated classification algorithm is presented which processes short duration epochs of the electrocardiogram (ECG) data. The automated classification algorithm is based on support vector machines (SVM) and has been trained and tested on sleep apnea recordings from subjects with and without OSA. The results show that our automated classification system can recognize epochs of sleep disorders with a high degree of accuracy, approximately 96.5%. Moreover, the system we developed can be used as a basis for future development of a tool for OSA screening.