HMM-based snorer group recognition for Sleep Apnea diagnosis

This paper presents an Hidden Markov Models (HMM)-based snorer group recognition approach for Obstructive Sleep Apenea diagnosis. It models the spatio-temporal characteristics of different snorer groups belonging to different genders and AHI severity levels. The current experiment includes selecting snore data from subjects, identifying snorer groups based on gender and AHI values (AHI < 15 and AHI > 15), detecting snore episodes, MFCC computation, training and testing HMMs. A set of multi-level classification rules is employed for incremental diagnosis of OSA. The proposed method, with a relatively small data set, produces results nearly comparable to any existing methods with single feature class. It classifies snore episodes with 62.0% (male), 67.0% (female) and recognizes snorer group with 78.5% accuracy. The approach makes its diagnosis decision at 85.7% (sensitivity), 71.4% (specificity) for males and 85.7% (sensitivity and specificity) for females.