An automatic rules extraction approach to support OSA events detection in an mHealth system

Detection and real time monitoring of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) episodes are very important tasks in healthcare. To suitably face them, this paper proposes an easy-to-use, cheap mobile-based approach relying on three steps. First, single-channel ECG data from a patient are collected by a wearable sensor and are recorded on a mobile device. Second, the automatic extraction of knowledge about that patient takes place offline, and a set of IF…THEN rules containing heart-rate variability (HRV) parameters is achieved. Third, these rules are used in our real-time mobile monitoring system: the same wearable sensor collects the single-channel ECG data and sends them to the same mobile device, which now processes those data online to compute HRV-related parameter values. If these values activate one of the rules found for that patient, an alarm is immediately produced. This approach has been tested on a literature database with 35 OSA patients. A comparison against five well-known classifiers has been carried out.