Muscle Activity Detection during Sleep by Ear-EEG

Muscle activation during sleep is an important biomarker in the diagnosis of several sleep disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. Muscle activity is typically assessed manually based on the EMG channels from polysomnography recordings. Ear-EEG provides a mobile and comfortable alternative for sleep assessment. In this study, ear-EEG was used to automatically detect muscle activities during sleep. The study was based on a dataset comprising four full night recordings from 20 healthy subjects with concurrent polysomnography and ear-EEG. A binary label, active or relax, extracted from the chin EMG was assigned to selected 30 s epoch of the sleep recordings in order to train a classifier to predict muscle activation. We found that the ear-EEG based classifier detected muscle activity with an accuracy of 88% and a Cohen’s kappa value of 0.71 relative to the labels derived from the chin EMG channels. The analysis also showed a significant difference in the distribution of muscle activity between REM and non-REM sleep.

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