Validation of sleep-staging accuracy for an in-home sleep electroencephalography device compared with simultaneous polysomnography in patients with obstructive sleep apnea

Efforts to simplify standard polysomnography (PSG) in laboratories, especially for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), and assess its agreement with portable electroencephalogram (EEG) devices are limited. We aimed to evaluate the agreement between a portable EEG device and type I PSG in patients with OSA and examine the EEG-based arousal index’s ability to estimate apnea severity. We enrolled 77 Japanese patients with OSA who underwent simultaneous type I PSG and portable EEG monitoring. Combining pulse rate, oxygen saturation (SpO2), and EEG improved sleep staging accuracy. Bland–Altman plots, paired t-tests, and receiver operating characteristics curves were used to assess agreement and screening accuracy. Significant small biases were observed for total sleep time, sleep latency, awakening after falling asleep, sleep efficiency, N1, N2, and N3 rates, arousal index, and apnea indexes. All variables showed > 95% agreement in the Bland–Altman analysis, with interclass correlation coefficients of 0.761–0.982, indicating high inter-instrument validity. The EEG-based arousal index demonstrated sufficient power for screening AHI ≥ 15 and ≥ 30 and yielded promising results in predicting apnea severity. Portable EEG device showed strong agreement with type I PSG in patients with OSA. These suggest that patients with OSA may assess their condition at home.