A Wearable Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) System for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Assessment

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), one of the most common sleep-related breathing disorders, contributes as a potentially life-threatening disease. In this paper, a wearable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) system for OSA monitoring is proposed. As a non-invasive system that can monitor oxygenation and cerebral hemodynamics, the proposed system is dedicated to mapping the pathogenic characteristics of OSA to dynamic changes in blood oxygen concentration and to constructing an automatic approach for assessing OSA. An algorithm including feature extraction, feature selection, and classification is proposed to signals. Permutation entropy(PE), for quantitative measuring the complexity of time series, is firstly involved to characterize the features of the physiological signals. Subsequently, the principal component analysis (PCA) for feature dimensionality reduction and support vector machine (SVM) algorithm for OSA classification are applied. The proposed method has been validated on a dataset that collected by the wearable system. It includes 40 subjects and composes of normal, and various severity cessation of breathing (e.g., mild, moderate, and severe). Experimental results exhibit that the proposed system can effectively distinguish OSA and non-OSA subjects, with an accuracy of 91.89%. The proposed system is expected to pave the novel perspective for OSA assessment in terms of cerebral hemodynamics.