Long-Term Sleep Assessment by Unobtrusive Pressure Sensor Arrays

Due to a globally aging population, there is a growing demand for smart home technology which can serve to monitor the health and safety of older adults. Sleep monitoring has emerged as a crucial element of this monitoring. While polysomnography (PSG) is an effective and accurate tool for sleep monitoring, it is obtrusive as the user must wear the instruments during the experiment. Therefore, there has been a growing interest in deploying unobtrusive sleep monitoring devices, specifically for long-term patient monitoring. This paper performs a comprehensive investigation on long-term sleep pattern changes by investigating bed occupancy, number of bed exits during day and breathing rate variability. Measurements were made using unobtrusive pressure sensitive sensor arrays on data captured from several participants collected in a long-term basis, which provided a large volume of data. Multiple algorithms are proposed that can be described as movement detection, sensor data fusion and bed occupancy detection. The methods developed in the paper and the related findings can be of interest for future clinical remote patient monitoring systems.