[Acoustic information in snoring noises]

More than one third of all people snore regularly. Snoring is a common accompaniment of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and is often disruptive for the bed partner.

This work gives an overview of the history of and state of research on acoustic analysis of snoring for classification of OSA severity, detection of obstructive events, measurement of annoyance, and identification of the sound excitation location.

Based on these objectives, searches were conducted in the literature databases PubMed and IEEE Xplore. Publications dealing with the respective objectives according to title and abstract were selected from the search results.

A total of 48 publications concerning the above objectives were considered. The limiting factor of many studies is the small number of subjects upon which the analyses are based.

Recent research findings show promising results, such that acoustic analysis may find a place in the framework of sleep diagnostics, thus supplementing the recognized standard methods.