Development of a Sleep Monitoring System by Using a Depth Sensor: A Pilot Study

Sleep is an essential part of health and longevity persons. As people grow older, the quality of their sleep becomes vital. Poor sleep quality can make negative physiological, psychological, and social impacts on the elderly population, causing a range of health problems including coronary heart disease, depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Early detection, proper diagnosis, and treatments for sleep disorders can be achieved by identifying sleep patterns through long-term sleep monitoring. Although many studies developed sleep monitoring systems by using non-invasive measures such as body temperature, pressure, or body movement signal, research is still limited to detect sleep position changes by using a depth camera. The present study is intended (1) to identify concerns on the existing sleep monitoring system based on the literature review and (2) propose to developing a non-invasive sleep monitoring system using an infrared depth camera. For the literature review, various journal/conference papers have been reviewed to understand the characteristics, tools, and algorithms of the existing sleep monitoring systems. For the system development and validation, we collected data for the sleep positions from two subjects (35 years old man and 84 years old women) during the four-hour sleep. Kinect II depth sensor was used for data collection. We found that the averaged depth data is useful measure to notify the participants’ positional changes during the sleep.