An actigraphy heterogeneous mixture model for sleep assessment

Wrist actigraphy is a well established procedure to monitor human activity. Among other areas, it has a special relevance in sleep studies where its lightweight and non-intrusive nature make it a valuable tool to access the circadian cycle. While there are several methods to extract information from the data, the differentiation between sleep and wakefulness states is still an open discussion. In this paper, the characteristics of the movements in the different states are assumed to be intrinsically different. These differences are not simply related with magnitude and movement counting, but due to real differences on the statistical distributions describing the actigraphy data. Thus it is possible to refine the discrimination level when detecting these states. The proposed methodology to characterize the actigraphy data is based on a mixture of three canonical distributions; i)Exponential, ii)Rayleigh and iii)Gaussian. It is shown that the weights and parameters estimated in each state are organized into almost separable clusters on the feature space. This suggests the ability of the method to discriminate these states based only on the movements recorded on actigraphy data.