A Framework Of An Unconstrained Sleep Monitoring System

In this paper a framework is proposed to regularize the procedure of developing an unconstrained monitoring system. An unconstrained sleep monitoring system is a healthcare system aimed to monitor one's physiological parameters during sleep without interfering with his or her sleep. The framework consists of 3 parts: hardware, software and evaluation method. The hardware is dedicated to collect physiological signal generated by sleepers, and the software is aimed to process the collected signal data to extract the physiological parameters. The evaluation method assesses the extracted result to evaluate the performance of the hardware and the software, and in turn helps modify the hardware or the software. All the 3 components need to meet certain requirements to guarantee the adaptability and feasibility of the system. An example system is presented to instantiate the framework, in which experiments of several nights were conducted to validate the monitoring system. This paper generalizes a new framework on the development of an unconstrained sleep monitoring system and provides researchers and developers with a comprehensive view over healthcare systems.