Sleep evaluation device for home-care

The influence of sleep conditions to human health and performance is currently well known but still underestimated and monitoring devices are not widespread. This paper describes measurement methodology and prototype design of a home-care sleep scoring device. The proposed solution is oriented towards low-cost equipment and easy-to-use data capture using contactless recording as far as possible. Unlike the regular laboratory systems, the quality of sleep is estimated from the video-recorded subject motion, audio-recorded acoustic effects and from the single-lead electrocardiogram being the only electrical signal recorded from the body surface. The presented prototype is built of consumer-grade devices working in a short-distance network and providing multimodal data. The information provided from different modes are partly redundant, giving opportunity for refinement of the accuracy, and partly complementary, widening the aspect of sleep analysis. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.