On-bed sleep posture recognition based on body-earth mover´s distance

Sleep quality is highly correlated with many chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and sleep disorders. Sleep posture is a key component in sleep quality assessment. Currently, body pressure analysis has been a popular approach for sleep posture recognition [1]. In this paper, we propose a novel distance metric for sleep posture dissimilarity measure, called Body-Earth Mover´s Distance (BEMD). BEMD can effectively recognize the difference of pressure distributions by projecting the pressure distribution to the horizontal and vertical directions. A pilot study is performed with 14 persons for six different postures. The experimental results show that our proposed BEMD can achieve a high accuracy of 90.78%, which outperforms the previous method [1] with an improvement of 9.1%.