Evaluating the sleep quality of obstructive sleep apnea patients after continuous positive airway pressure treatment

Continuous positive airway pressure treatment (CPAP) is administered to treat the common disorder of obstructive sleep apnea. However, patients receiving CPAP treatment without a sleep assessment and clinical diagnosis often do not feel or understand the improvement in their condition, necessitating a sleep quality improvement index for physicians to analyze improvements in patient treatment rapidly. This work presents a novel sleep quality evaluation system that calculates the improvement value for sleep quality using electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram signal features, as well as fuzzy inferences. Experimental results indicate that the sleep quality improvement rating of the proposed system and that of the apnea-hyponea index correlate with each other. Importantly, the proposed system can identify considerable levels of improvement in the physiological signals of patients having under-gone CPAP treatment. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.