Development of an IoT-Based Sleep Apnea Monitoring System for Healthcare Applications

Retracted: Development of an IoT-Based Sleep Apnea Monitoring System for Healthcare Applications

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.1155/2021/7152576.].

Sleep disorder and apnea events detection framework with high performance using two-tier learning model design

Sleep apnea is defined as a breathing disorder that affects sleep. Early detection of sleep apnea helps doctors to take intervention for patients to prevent sleep apnea. Manually making this determination is a time-consuming and subjectivity problem. Therefore, many different methods based on polysomnography (PSG) have been proposed and applied to detect this disorder. In this study, a unique two-layer method is proposed, in which there are four different deep learning models in the deep neural network (DNN), gated recurrent unit (GRU), recurrent neural network (RNN), RNN-based-long term short term memory (LSTM) architecture in the first layer, and a machine learning-based meta-learner (decision-layer) in the second layer. The strategy of making a preliminary decision in the first layer and verifying/correcting the results in the second layer is adopted. In the training of this architecture, a vector consisting of 23 features consisting of snore, oxygen saturation, arousal and sleep score data is used together with PSG data. A dataset consisting of 50 patients, both children and adults, is prepared. A number of pre-processing and under-sampling applications have been made to eliminate the problem of unbalanced classes. Proposed method has an accuracy of 95.74% and 99.4% in accuracy of apnea detection (apnea, hypopnea and normal) and apnea types detection (central, mixed and obstructive), respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that patient-independent consistent results can be produced with high accuracy. This robust model can be considered as a system that will help in the decisions of sleep clinics where it is expected to detect sleep disorders in detail with high performance.

Heart rate estimation from ballistocardiogram signals processing via low-cost telemedicine architectures: a comparative performance evaluation

Medical devices (MDs) have been designed for monitoring the parameters of patients in many sectors. Nonetheless, despite being high-performing and reliable, they often turn out to be expensive and intrusive. In addition, MDs are almost exclusively used in controlled, hospital-based environments. Paving a path of technological innovation in the clinical field, a very active line of research is currently dealing with the possibility to rely on non-medical-graded low-cost devices, to develop unattended telemedicine (TM) solutions aimed at non-invasively gathering data, signals, and images. In this article, a TM solution is proposed for monitoring the heart rate (HR) of patients during sleep. A remote patient monitoring system (RPMS) featuring a smart belt equipped with pressure sensors for ballistocardiogram (BCG) signals sampling was deployed. A field trial was then conducted over a 2-month period on 24 volunteers, who also agreed to wear a finger pulse oximeter capable of producing a photoplethysmography (PPG) signal as the gold standard, to examine the feasibility of the solution via the estimation of HR values from the collected BCG signals. For this purpose, two of the highest-performing approaches for HR estimation from BCG signals, one algorithmic and the other based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), were retrieved from the literature and updated for a TM-related use case. Finally, HR estimation performances were assessed in terms of patient-wise mean absolute error (MAE). Results retrieved from the literature (controlled environment) outperformed those achieved in the experimentation (TM environment) by 29% (MAE = 4.24 vs. 5.46, algorithmic approach) and 52% (MAE = 2.32 vs. 3.54, CNN-based approach), respectively. Nonetheless, a low packet loss ratio, restrained elaboration time of the collected biomedical big data, low-cost deployment, and positive feedback from the users, demonstrate the robustness, reliability, and applicability of the proposed TM solution. In light of this, further steps will be planned to fulfill new targets, such as evaluation of respiratory rate (RR), and pattern assessment of the movement of the participants overnight.

System and Method for Driver Drowsiness Detection Using Behavioral and Sensor-Based Physiological Measures

The amount of road accidents caused by driver drowsiness is one of the world's major challenges. These accidents lead to numerous fatal and non-fatal injuries which impose substantial financial strain on individuals and governments every year. As a result, it is critical to prevent catastrophic accidents and reduce the financial burden on society caused by driver drowsiness. The research community has primarily focused on two approaches to identify driver drowsiness during the last decade: intrusive and non-intrusive. The intrusive approach includes physiological measures, and the non-intrusive approach includes vehicle-based and behavioral measures. In an intrusive approach, sensors are used to detect driver drowsiness by placing them on the driver's body, whereas in a non-intrusive approach, a camera is used for drowsiness detection by identifying yawning patterns, eyelid movement and head inclination. Noticeably, most research has been conducted in driver drowsiness detection methods using only single measures that failed to produce good outcomes. Furthermore, these measures were only functional in certain conditions. This paper proposes a model that combines the two approaches, non-intrusive and intrusive, to detect driver drowsiness. Behavioral measures as a non-intrusive approach and sensor-based physiological measures as an intrusive approach are combined to detect driver drowsiness. The proposed hybrid model uses AI-based Multi-Task Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks (MTCNN) as a behavioral measure to recognize the driver's facial features, and the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensor as a physiological measure to collect the skin conductance of the driver that helps to increase the overall accuracy. Furthermore, the model's efficacy has been computed in a simulated environment. The outcome shows that the proposed hybrid model is capable of identifying the transition from awake to a drowsy state in the driver in all conditions with the efficacy of 91%.

IoT-Based Healthcare-Monitoring System towards Improving Quality of Life: A Review

The Internet of Things (IoT) is essential in innovative applications such as smart cities, smart homes, education, healthcare, transportation, and defense operations. IoT applications are particularly beneficial for providing healthcare because they enable secure and real-time remote patient monitoring to improve the quality of people’s lives. This review paper explores the latest trends in healthcare-monitoring systems by implementing the role of the IoT. The work discusses the benefits of IoT-based healthcare systems with regard to their significance, and the benefits of IoT healthcare. We provide a systematic review on recent studies of IoT-based healthcare-monitoring systems through literature review. The literature review compares various systems’ effectiveness, efficiency, data protection, privacy, security, and monitoring. The paper also explores wireless- and wearable-sensor-based IoT monitoring systems and provides a classification of healthcare-monitoring sensors. We also elaborate, in detail, on the challenges and open issues regarding healthcare security and privacy, and QoS. Finally, suggestions and recommendations for IoT healthcare applications are laid down at the end of the study along with future directions related to various recent technology trends.