Sleep apnoea detection in children using PPG envelope-based dynamic features

Photopletysmography signal has been developed for monitoring of Obstructive Sleep Apnoea, in particular, whenever an apneic episode occurs, that is reflected by decreases in the photopletysmography signal amplitude fluctuation. However, other physiological events such as artifacts and deep inspiratory gasp produce sympathetic activation, being unrelated to apnea. Thus, its high sensitivity can produce misdetections and overestimate apneic episodes. In this regard, a methodology for selecting a set of relevant non-stationary features to increase the specificity of the obstructive sleep apnea detector is discussed. A time-evolving version of the standard linear multivariate decomposition is discussed to perform stochastic dimensionality reduction. As a result, performed outcomes of accuracy bring enough evidence that if using a subset of cepstral-based dynamic features, then patient classification accuracy is 83.3%. Therefore, photoplethysmography - based detection provides an adequate scheme for obstructive sleep apnea diagnosis.