Poster Abstract: Unobtrusive Sleep Monitoring with Low-Cost Pressure Sensor Array

Human beings spend approximately one third of their day sleeping to maintain bodily function and mental health. Many individuals suffer from life-threatening apnea episodes or breathing blockages during sleep. This paper proposes a low-cost, unobtrusive, portable pressure sensor array (PSA) for analyzing and tracking the sleep quality based on parameters such as respiratory rate (RR), body movements (BM), in-bed time (IBT), and apnea episodes (AE). The pressure sensors are fabricated by stacking a layer of anti-static (velostat) material with two layers of conductive fabric. The pressure sensors are sealed with two laminating layers. A 32-bit cortex-MO+ based microcontroller is used for data acquisition. The data obtained is locally stored in a PC for processing and analysis. The respiratory rate is extracted by data pre-processing and frequency analysis with a fixed window segmentation.