A Respiratory Movement Monitoring System Using Fiber-Grating Vision Sensor for Diagnosing Sleep Apnea Syndrome

A non-restrictive and non-contact respiratory movement monitoring system that finds the boundary between chest and abdomen automatically and detects the vertical movement of each part of the body separately is proposed. The system uses a fiber-grating vision sensor technique and the boundary position detection is carried out by calculating the centers of gravity of upward moving and downward moving sampling points, respectively. In the experiment to evaluate the ability to detect the respiratory movement signals of each part and to discriminate between obstructive and central apneas, detected signals of the two parts and their total clearly showed the peculiarities of obstructive and central apnea. The cross talk between the two categories classified automatically according to several rules that reflect the peculiarities was ≤ 15%. This result is sufficient for discriminating central sleep apnea syndrome from obstructive sleep apnea syndrome and indicates that the system is promising as screening equipment. © 2005 The Optical Society of Japan