Noncontact Sleep Monitoring With Infrared Video Data to Estimate Sleep Apnea Severity and Distinguish Between Positional and Nonpositional Sleep Apnea: Model Development and Experimental Validation

Background Sleep apnea is a respiratory disorder characterized by frequent breathing cessation during sleep. Sleep apnea severity is determined by the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), which is the hourly rate of respiratory events. In positional sleep apnea, the AHI is higher in the supine sleeping position than it is in other sleeping positions. Positional therapy is a behavioral strategy (eg, wearing an item to encourage sleeping toward the lateral position) to treat positional apnea. The gold standard of diagnosing sleep apnea and whether or not it is positional is polysomnography; however, this test is inconvenient, expensive, and has a long waiting list. Objective The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a noncontact method to estimate sleep apnea severity and to distinguish positional versus nonpositional sleep apnea. Methods A noncontact deep-learning algorithm was developed to analyze infrared video of sleep for estimating AHI and to distinguish patients with positional vs nonpositional sleep apnea. Specifically, a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture was used to process movements extracted by optical flow to detect respiratory events. Positional sleep apnea patients were subsequently identified by combining the AHI information provided by the 3D-CNN model with the sleeping position (supine vs lateral) detected via a previously developed CNN model. Results The algorithm was validated on data of 41 participants, including 26 men and 15 women with a mean age of 53 (SD 13) years, BMI of 30 (SD 7), AHI of 27 (SD 31) events/hour, and sleep duration of 5 (SD 1) hours; 20 participants had positional sleep apnea, 15 participants had nonpositional sleep apnea, and the positional status could not be discriminated for the remaining 6 participants. AHI values estimated by the 3D-CNN model correlated strongly and significantly with the gold standard (Spearman correlation coefficient 0.79, P<.001). Individuals with positional sleep apnea (based on an AHI threshold of 15) were identified with 83% accuracy and an F1-score of 86%. Conclusions This study demonstrates the possibility of using a camera-based method for developing an accessible and easy-to-use device for screening sleep apnea at home, which can be provided in the form of a tablet or smartphone app.