Breathing Measurement and Sleep Apnea Detection Experiment and Analysis using Piezoelectric Sensor

In this paper, we implemented a respiration measurement system consisting of piezoelectric sensor, respiration signal processing device, and a viewer on a notebook. We tried an experiment for measuring respiration and detecting sleep apnea syndrome when a subject lay on a bed. We applied the respiration measurement algorithm to sensor data obtained from four subjects. In order to get a good graph shape, data manipulation methods such as moving averages and maximum values were applied. The window size for moving average was chosen as N=70, and the threshold value for each subject was customized. In this case, the proposed system showed 96.0% accuracy. When the maximum value among 90 data was applied instead of moving average, our system achieved 95.1% accuracy. In an experiment for detecting sleep apnea syndrome, the system showed that sleep apnea occurred correctly and calculated the average interval of sleep apnea. While infants or the elderly as well as patients with sleep apnea syndrome are lying down on a bed, our results are also expected to be able to cope with some accidental emergency situation by observing their respiration and detecting sleep apnea.