Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 資訊工程學系 === 106 === According to the statistics, about 6% population suffers from sleep apnea in the U.S. Sleep apnea may lead to mental discomfort, headache and doze. These symptoms cause discomfort in daily life. Moreover, they may lead to accidents (e.g., car accidents). Therefore, sleep apnea should not be ignored. At present, polysomnography is commonly used to perform overnight sleep recordings so as to determine whether or not the patient has sleep apnea. However, due to the limited resources in hospitals and sleep centers, patients have to wait for weeks or even months for polysomnography. Besides, sleeping in an unfamiliar place such as a hospital or a sleep center may cause poor sleep quality, affecting the accuracy of sleep diagnosis. Generally, polysomnography is not suitable for home use. One reason is that, it is too expensive, and the other reason is that, it requires a long time to setup a larger number of sensors for polysomnography.
The proposed system is designed as a wearable device based on photoplethysmography (PPG). The system has low cost, and it does not require setting up a lot of sensors for physiological signal recording. The system can report the degree of blood oxygen saturation, heart rate and respiratory rate. The proposed system has been compared with the polysomnography measurement on oxygen saturation, heart rate and respiratory rate. Besides, by the change of heart rate, the proposed system can detect sleep apnea events. The accuracy of the sleep apnea detection method reaches 84%. Thus, the proposed system can be used for sleep apnea self-screening, allowing the user to evaluate whether or not to go to seek medical attention.
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