Diagnosing Sleep Apnea From Your Own Bed
Diagnosing Sleep Apnea From Your Own Bed
June 12, 2015
The Huffington Post — Some 4,000 sleep experts from around the world descended on Seattle, Washington for SLEEP 2015, an annual conference sponsored by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.
Prof. Yaniv Zigel
Topics and research on all things related to sleep — how much we need, how much we don’t get, how much is disrupted by undiagnosed sleep disorders and how a better, cheaper, less obtrusive way to detect sleep apnea is needed — were discussed.
“Millions of people globally have poor sleep quality, and most of them, 80 percent, are unaware of it,” says Prof. Yaniv Zigel, Ph.D., head of the Biomedical Signal Processing Research Lab in BGU’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, whose lab has developed a new, easier way diagnose sleep apnea.
One of the main reasons sleep disorders go undetected, Prof. Zigel says, is that the current method of diagnosing sleep apnea, known as polysomnography, involves sleeping over at a hospital sleep lab with tangles of wires attached to your head and body.
“We’re trying to make it less invasive,” he says.
The system developed in Prof. Zigel’s lab at BGU places a microphone in the ceiling above a person’s bed and records breathing to detect whether a person is awake or asleep. Called breath sound analysis, the sounds are analyzed using an algorithm.
In a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, the audio device was found to be about 83 percent as accurate as polysomnography sensors that detect brain waves, heart signals and muscle activity.
Read more of this article by Patricia S. Guthrie on The Huffington Post >>
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