SmartHypnos eXpert: A MATLAB toolbox for sleep experts supporting sleep staging and respiratory event detection

Sleep is a biological process of fundamental importance to physical and mental health. Sleep staging and respiratory event detection are lengthy, error prone and tiresome procedures conducted by sleep experts. Computerized tools would potentially reduce the time needed for sleep staging. However, such tools are not widely used by the experts, due to reduced accuracy or lack of sleep specific solutions. A few commercial tools are accompanied by dedicated hardware solutions.

Aiming to offer a free and sleep specific tool for automatic sleep staging a free yet accurate and sleep specific, we present an integrated MATLAB^{\protect \relax \special {t4ht=®}}toolbox, SmartHypnos eXpert. The SmartHypnos eXpert is an ease of use and learn, graphical user interface. It can visualize multimodal and polysomnographic time-series. Data are presented in an organized structure and integrated into a single interface providing quick and effortless access to the signals. The validity and accuracy of SmartHypnos X regarding automatic sleep staging has been performed through a polysomnographic dataset of 8879 epochs of 30 s duration each.

The SmartHypnos X reached an accuracy rate comparable to inter-expert agreement, over 84%, while the automatic respiratory event detection accuracy was above 90%. The toolbox was positively evaluated by a group of sleep experts in terms of easy of use, learnability and functionality.

SmartHypnos X offers compatibility with Android devices, enabling the user to import data recorded from smartphones and presenting them in graphical form. It also supports the generation of visual analytics for the expert. SmartHypnos X is the first free tool for automatic sleep analysis with the highest accuracy across other solutions.