Amplitude-based central apnea screening

Sleep apnea is an important health issue facing those with sleep-disordered breathing, and many challenges remain in terms of accessibility and affordability of screening methods. Using a pressure sensor array placed beneath the mattress for apnea detection would allow the monitoring and detection to take place in homes instead of in hospital and would be less obtrusive to the subject. This paper uses features of the variance signal to screen for central apneas using a non-contact sensor. A controlled experiment using an unobtrusive fiber optic pressure sensor array placed beneath the mattress yielded 11 participant files. This paper asses a proposed algorithm which applies a limit on the amplitude of the unbiased variance estimator for 10s window to determine the presence of apnea. The length of the moving variance window is varied as is the amplitude, to observe the detection rate as data is stratified by mattress type and lying position.