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Apnea and heart rate detection from tracheal body sounds for the diagnosis of sleep-related breathing disorders

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Abstract

Sleep apnea is one of the most common sleep disorders. Here, patients suffer from multiple breathing pauses longer than 10 s during the night which are referred to as apneas. The standard method for the diagnosis of sleep apnea is the attended cardiorespiratory polysomnography (PSG). However, this method is expensive and the extensive recording equipment can have a significant impact on sleep quality falsifying the results. To overcome these problems, a comfortable and novel system for sleep monitoring based on the recording of tracheal sounds and movement data is developed. For apnea detection, a unique signal processing method utilizing both signals is introduced. Additionally, an algorithm for extracting the heart rate from body sounds is developed. For validation, ten subjects underwent a full-night PSG testing, using the developed sleep monitor in concurrence. Considering polysomnography as gold standard the developed instrumentation reached a sensitivity of 92.8% and a specificity of 99.7% for apnea detection. Heart rate measured with the proposed method was strongly correlated with heart rate derived from conventional ECG (r 2 = 0.8164). No significant signal losses are reported during the study. In conclusion, we demonstrate a novel approach to reliably and noninvasively detect both apneas and heart rate during sleep.

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Acknowledgments

This study is part of the project entitled “SomnoSound” in cooperation with Beurer GmbH supported by the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft industrieller Forschungsvereinigungen AiF (KF2186205AK3)”. The authors would like to thank Beurer GmbH for their assistance and support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Medical Engineering, University of Applied Science Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 55, 89075, Ulm, Germany

    Christoph Kalkbrenner, Manuel Eichenlaub & Rainer Brucher

  2. Department of Internal Medicine II, University Hospital Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 23, 89081, Ulm, Germany

    Stefan Rüdiger, Cornelia Kropf-Sanchen & Wolfgang Rottbauer

Authors
  1. Christoph Kalkbrenner
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  2. Manuel Eichenlaub
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  3. Stefan Rüdiger
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  4. Cornelia Kropf-Sanchen
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  5. Wolfgang Rottbauer
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  6. Rainer Brucher
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Correspondence to Christoph Kalkbrenner.

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Conflict of interest

The authors state no conflict of interest. Informed consent has been obtained from all individuals included in this study. The research related to human use has been complied with all the relevant national regulations, institutional policies and in accordance the tenets of the Helsinki Declaration, and has been approved by the authors’ institutional review board or equivalent committee.

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Kalkbrenner, C., Eichenlaub, M., Rüdiger, S. et al. Apnea and heart rate detection from tracheal body sounds for the diagnosis of sleep-related breathing disorders. Med Biol Eng Comput 56, 671–681 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-017-1706-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-017-1706-y

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