title: High frequency region of the snore spectra carry important information on the disease of sleep apnoea.
abstract: Snoring is the most common symptom of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). Several researchers have reported differences between the power spectra of non-OSA and OSA snorers. The traditional approach over the years has been to record snore sounds at a bandwidth of < 5 kHz. Narrowing of the upper airways during OSA events and the resulting upward shift of snore frequencies also lend support to the idea of examining snore sounds beyond 5 kHz. In this paper, we compute the power spectra of snores in three different bands defined as: low-frequency band (LFB: < 5 kHz); middle-frequency band (MFB: 5-10 kHz) and high-frequency band (HFB: 10-20 kHz). We illustrate that there is a significant difference between non-OSA snorers (Apnoea Hypopnoea Index (AHI) < 10) and OSA snorers (AHI > 10) in the region > 5 kHz. We then develop a feature to diagnose OSA based on the spectral differences in the high frequency region and evaluate its performance on a database of 20 subjects. Our results strongly suggest that the high-frequency region of the snore sounds carry information, hitherto disregarded, on the disease of sleep apnoea.
authors: Institute of Technology and Science, The University of Tokushima, Japan. emoto@ee.tokushima-u.ac.jp
authors: T
authors: T
authors: Emoto
authors: U R
authors: UR
authors: Abeyratne
authors: M
authors: M
authors: Akutagawa
authors: S
authors: S
authors: Konaka
authors: Y
authors: Y
authors: Kinouchi
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D000402:Airway Obstruction / Q000503:physiopathology; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D017286:Polysomnography; D020181:Sleep Apnea, Obstructive / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012913:Snoring / Q000503:physiopathology*; D013016:Sound