A Miniaturized Flexible Functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy System for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Detection

The clinical manifestations of OSA (obstructive sleep apnea) are night sleep snoring accompanied by apnea. fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) can measure the relative concentration changes of oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin, thereby measuring hemodynamics and oxygenation. Combined with the clinical manifestations of obstructive sleep apnea, fNIRS technology can be used in the monitoring of OSA. According to the principle of fNIRS, a miniaturized, wireless, and flexible device is designed in the article. The device can measure the change of blood oxygen concentration in the forehead of the brain, so that achieve the purpose of detecting OSA. To verify the effectiveness of the equipment, a breathing experiment was designed in the article to compare the equipment with the existing NIRX system. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that proposed a miniaturized flexible sleep apnea system based on monitoring fluctuations of cerebral hemodynamics. Meanwhile, the feasibility of the proposed system was verified. However, the stability of the equipment and related data processing algorithms need to be enhanced. The proposed system is expected to pave the way for the investigation of the involvement of the cerebral hemodynamics in the pathogenesis of OSA patients.