Detecting Disordered Breathing and Limb Movement Using In-Bed Force Sensors

We present and evaluate measurement fusion and decision fusion for recognizing apnea and periodic limb movement in sleep episodes. We used an in-bed sensor system composed of an array of strain gauges to detect pressure changes corresponding to respiration and body movement. The sensor system was placed under the bed mattress during sleep and continuously recorded pressure changes. We evaluated both fusion frameworks in a study with nine adult participants that had mixed occurrences of normal sleep, apnea, and periodic limb movement. Both frameworks yielded similar recognition accuracies of 72.1 ± ∼  12% compared to 63.7 ± 17.4% for a rule-based detection reported in the literature. We concluded that the pattern recognition methods can outperform previous rule-based detection methods for classifying disordered breathing and period limb movements simultaneously.