In-Home Sleep Monitoring using Edge Intelligence

We spend about one-third of our life either sleeping or attempting to do so. Sleeping is a key aspect for most human body processes, affecting physical and mental health and the ability to fight diseases, develop immunity and control metabolism. Therefore, monitoring human sleep quality is extremely important for the detection of possible sleep disorders. Several technologies exist to achieve this goal, however, most of them are expensive proprietary systems, some require hospitalization and many use intrusive equipment that can, by itself, affect sleep quality. This paper presents an intelligent system, a complete low-cost hardware and software solution, for monitoring the sleep quality of an individual in a home environment. User privacy is guaranteed as all processing is done at the edge and no audio or video is stored. This system monitors several fundamental aspects of sleeping periods in real-time using a low cost single-board computer for processing, a camera for body motion detection (MD module) and for eye/sleep status detection (SSD module), and a microphone for audio recognition (AUDR module) of breath pattern analysis and snore detection. It can be strategically placed near the bed to avoid interfering with the natural sleep pattern. For each sleeping period, the system produces a final report that can be a valuable aid for improving the sleeping health of the monitored person. Functional unitary tests were carried successfully on the selected, low-cost, hardware platform (Raspberry Pi). The entire process was validated by an expert clinical psychologist, ensuring the reliability and effectiveness of the system. The visual and sound modules use sophisticated computer vision and machine learning techniques suitable for edge computing devices. Each of the system’s features have been independently tested, using properly organized audio and video datasets and the well established metrics of precision, recall and F1 score, to evaluate the binary classifiers in each of the three modules. The accuracy values obtained where 90.2% (MD), 79.1% (SSD) and 81.3% (AUDR), demonstrating the great application potential of our solution.