Contactless method for detection of infant sleep apnoea

Abstract

This paper presents a contactless method for monitoring infant sleep apnoea. The method uses a remote infrared (IR) sensor to monitor the motion of the infant's abdomen. This method has important clinical advantages in comparison with conventional methods. First, it improves the comfort and compliance of the infants. Second, it eliminates the effects of motion artefacts and skin irritation. Third, it enhances infant safety. Fourth, it does not require frequent calibration and thus enables a continuous monitoring of sleep apnoea. Finally, it is suitable for home applications. Experimental evaluation of this method showed that it has 85% accuracy, 85.71% specificity and 84.62% sensitivity, which imply that it is a promising technique for the detection of infant sleep apnoea.

Keywords:

• Apnoea detection methods
• Infant sleep apnoea
• Infrared motion sensors

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr Mohammad Abdelsalam (MD) and Mr Jamal Mahmoud for their help during the validation of the proposed method.