Sleep-Apnea Detection with UWB Active Sensors

Sleep apnea is a disorder that is characterized by medium/long pauses in breathing or instances of shallow or infrequent breathing during sleep usually associated to bradicardy. Each pause in breathing, named apnea, can last from several seconds to several minutes and it can cause also death in infants within six months of age. In order to solve such an issue, we propose a monitoring and alert system based on an Ultra Wide Band transceiver. The radar is equipped with two transmit/receive antennas and it is able to acquire the reflections coming from patient breast and analyze his/her breath so as to detect apnea when it occurs. We perform tests on a real environment to evaluate the validity of the proposed approach.