A lightweight method for detecting sleep-related activities based on load sensing

Current practices in healthcare rely on expensive and labor-intensive procedures that are not adequate for future healthcare demands. Therefore, alternatives are required to complement or enhance healthcare services, both at clinical and home settings. Hospital and ordinary beds can be equipped with load cells to enable load sensing applications, such as for weight and sleep assessment. Beds with such functionalities represent a tangible alternative to expensive and obtrusive routines for sleep assessment, such as polysomnography. A finite-state machine is proposed as a lightweight on-line method to detect sleep-related activities, such as bed entrances and exits, awakenings, wakefulness, and sleep atonia. The proposed approach is evaluated with a dataset collected in real homes of older people receiving night-time home care services.