A Non-invasive Wearable Neck-Cuff System for Real-Time Sleep Monitoring

Sleep is an important part of our lives which affects many life factors such as memory, learning, metabolism and the immune system. Researchers have found correlations between sleep and several diseases such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary disease, Chronic Heart Failure, Alzheimer's disease, etc. However, sleep data is mainly recorded and diagnosed in sleep labs or in hospitals for some critical cases with high costs. In this work we develop a non-invasive, wearable neck-cuff system capable of real-time monitoring and visualization of physiological signals. These signals are generated from various sensors housed in a soft neck-worn collar and sent via Bluetooth to a cell phone which stores the data. This data is processed and reported to the user or uploaded to the cloud and/or to a local PC. With this system we are able to monitor people's sleep continuously in a non-invasive and low cost method while at the same time collect a large database for sleep data which may benefit future advances in new findings and possibly enable a diagnosis of other diseases. We show as one of the applications of our system the possible detection of obstructive sleep apnea which is a common sleep disorder.