title: Snoring detection using a piezo snoring sensor based on hidden Markov models.
abstract: This study presents a snoring detection method based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) using a piezo snoring sensor. Snoring is a major symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). In most sleep studies, snoring is detected with a microphone. Since these studies analyze the acoustic properties of snoring, they need to acquire data at high sampling rates, so a large amount of data should be processed. Recently, several sleep studies have monitored snoring using a piezo snoring sensor. However, an automatic method for snoring detection using a piezo snoring sensor has not been reported in the literature. This study proposed the HMM-based method to detect snoring using this sensor, which is attached to the neck. The data from 21 patients with OSA were gathered for training and test sets. The short-time Fourier transform and short-time energy were computed so they could be applied to HMMs. The data were classified as snoring, noise and silence according to their HMMs. As a result, the sensitivity and the positive predictivity values were 93.3% and 99.1% for snoring detection, respectively. The results demonstrated that the method produced simple, portable and user-friendly detection tools that provide an alternative to the microphone-based method.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Yonsei University, Wonju, Gangwondo, Korea.
authors.forename: Hyo-Ki
authors.initials: HK
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Jeon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Hojoong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Jin-Young
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Ha
authors.forename: Kyoung-Joung
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Lee
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D006801:Humans; D008390:Markov Chains; D008875:Middle Aged; D017286:Polysomnography; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D020181:Sleep Apnea, Obstructive / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D012913:Snoring / Q000175:diagnosis*