Development of a non-contact sleep monitoring system for children

Abstract

Daily monitoring is important, even for healthy children, because sleep plays a critical role in their development and growth. Polysomnography is necessary for sleep monitoring. However, measuring sleep requires specialized equipment and knowledge and is difficult to do at home. In recent years, smartwatches and other devices have been developed to easily measure sleep. However, they cannot measure children's sleep, and contact devices may disturb their sleep.A non-contact method of measuring sleep is the use of video during sleep. This is most suitable for the daily monitoring of children’s sleep, as it is simple and inexpensive. However, the algorithms have been developed only based on adult sleep, whereas children’s sleep is known to differ considerably from that of adults.For this reason, we conducted a non-contact estimation of sleep stages for children using video. The participants were children between the ages of 0–6 years old. We estimated the four stages of sleep using the body movement information calculated from the videos recorded. Six parameters were calculated from body movement information. As children’s sleep is known to change significantly as they grow, estimation was divided into two groups (0–2 and 3–6 years).The results show average estimation accuracies of 46.7 ± 6.6 and 49.0 ± 4.8% and kappa coefficients of 0.24 ± 0.11 and 0.28 ± 0.06 in the age groups of 0–2 and 3–6 years, respectively. This performance is comparable to or better than that reported in previous adult studies.

Revolutionizing Sleep Health: The Emergence and Impact of Personalized Sleep Medicine

“…Accurate sleep stage estimation is essential for the effective diagnosis and management of sleep disorders. Recently, there have been significant advancements in the methodologies used to assess sleep stages, including the adoption of non-contact devices [ 51 , 52 ] and techniques based on ML and deep learning [ 53 ]. These innovations enhance the precision of sleep stage detection, which is crucial for determining the overall quality and quantity of sleep, as well as its various impacts on health.…”