fbpx
 
Home / News, Videos & Publications / News / Medical Research /

A Device That Records Snores to Track Your Sleep

A Device That Records Snores to Track Your Sleep

March 30, 2015

Medical Research

LiveScience — BGU researchers have developed an algorithm to analyze a person’s recorded breathing sounds, in order to measure sleep duration and detect sleep disorders.

For example, the device could be used to diagnose people with obstructive sleep apnea, who stop breathing many times during the night.

Prof. Yaniv Zigel

Prof. Yaniv Zigel

In tests, the new system was about 83 percent as accurate as the sophisticated sleep monitoring that doctors do in clinical sleep labs.

Getting enough sleep is essential for good health, quality of life, work productivity and many other things. The gold standard for measuring sleep in a lab is polysomnography, which includes electroencephalography (EEG), to measure brain waves; echocardiography (ECG), to measure heart signals; and electromyography (EMG), to measure muscle activity.

But polysomnography is expensive, and requires a person to spend a night in a lab. This is one reason that more than 80 percent of people with sleep disorders go undiagnosed, says Prof. Yaniv Zigel, Ph.D., head of the Biomedical Signal Processing Research Lab in BGU’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, who worked on the new system.

The new system is designed to detect whether people are asleep or awake, based on their breathing sounds. When a person is sleeping, the muscles of the upper airway relax, which makes breathing noisier than it is when a person is awake.

The researchers wanted to create a device that was noninvasive. “You can sleep naturally, undisturbed, without any sensors connected to you or your mattress,” says Prof. Zigel.

Read more of this article by Tanya Davis on the LiveScience website >>