HealthGear: Automatic Sleep Apnea Detection and Monitoring with a Mobile Phone

Abstract

We present HealthGear, a real-time wearable system for monitoring, visualizing and analyzing physiological signals. HealthGear consists of a set of non-invasive physiological sensors wirelessly connected via Bluetooth to a cell phone which stores, transmits and analyzes the physiological data, and presents it to the user in an intelligible way. In this paper, we focus on an implementation of HealthGear using a blood oximeter to monitor the user’s blood oxygen level and pulse while sleeping. We also describe two different algorithms for automatically detecting sleep apnea events, and illustrate the performance of the overall system in a sleep study with 20 volunteers.