A Wireless Sensor System for Biopotential Recording in the Treatment of Sleep Apnea Disorder

Development in micro-electronic-mechanical systems (MEMS), wireless communications and digital electronics recently have made it possible to develop small size, low-power, low-cost sensor devices. Such devices can integrate data processing, communications and sensing capabilities. A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a group of sensors, or nodes, linked by a wireless medium (infrared or radio frequency) to perform distributed sensing tasks. Wireless sensor networks have many applications such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, security, and medical sampling. Many successful sensor applications have been deployed in very specialized networks, such as UCBerkeley\´s smart dust (J.M. Khan, 1999), MIT\´s mu-adaptive multidomain power aware sensors (http://www-mtl.mit.edu/research/icsystems/uamps/), and UCLA\´s wireless integrated sensor networks (http://www.janet.ucla.edu/WINS/). Sleep apnea is a very common disorder that affects millions of Americans, which is characterized by brief interruptions of breathing during sleep. The goal of this project is to develop a wireless system capable of recording from a large number of electrodes (map human bodies\´ biopotentials) to diagnose the disorders of sleep apnea. This research focuses on: (1) developing an application program for a project called "sleep apnea biopotential imager" based on crossbow sensor network product (http://www.xbow.com); (2) quantifying performance of this project