Detecting Obstructive Sleep Apnea events in a real-time mobile monitoring system through automatically extracted sets of rules

Performing detection and real-time monitoring of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a significant healthcare task. An easy, cheap, and mobile approach to monitor patients with OSA is proposed here. It gathers data from a patient by a single-channel ECG, and offline automatically extracts knowledge about that patient as a set of IF...THEN rules containing Heart Rate Variability (HRV) parameters. These rules are then used in the real-time mobile monitoring system: ECG data is collected by a wearable sensor, sent to a mobile device, and processed online to compute HRV-related parameter values. If a rule is activated by those values, the system produces an alarm. A literature database of OSA patients has been used to test the approach.