Bedside Laboratory Uncovers Sleep Disorders

A low-cost, patient-friendly bedside sleep laboratory helps identify sleep disorders in the patient's home setting.

The portable sleep laboratory can be strapped on unassisted by patients at home and does not restrict their freedom of movement. Only four sensors are needed to collect data on sleeping position, pulse rate, heartbeat, and blood oxygen concentration. The device is strapped to the patient's chest and transmits the recorded data over a standard wireless bluetooth connection to a local base station in the patient's home. This terminal automatically processes the data and transmits them via a custom-designed server over a secure, encrypted link to a terminal in the doctor's office.

The sleep laboratory was developed by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute for Integerated Circuits (ISS; Munich, Germany), and is currently being tested at the university hospitals of Marburg (Germany) and Nürnberg (Germany) on a total of 30 sleep-disorder patients.

"We have observed more than 50 patients under the usual sleep laboratory conditions, who at the same time were connected to our device. In this way, we were able to collect two sets of data and compare the results,” said Christian Weigand, Dipl.-Inf., who heads the IIS research group for medical communication and sensor systems. "We are working on a device that can operate with even fewer parameters, for instance just the [electrocardiogram] ECG.”

Conventional sleep disorder investigation usually requires an overnight stay in a sleep laboratory, where up to 24 vital parameters are monitored during the night. These data allow the underlying cause of the disorder to be diagnosed and an appropriate treatment to be prescribed. The complex differential diagnosis that this involves makes a visit to the sleep laboratory a costly, uncomfortable affair that could additionally falsify the measurement results.



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Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute