APNEA DETECTING SENSORS

Joe Antun Mithun*--Vikram. V.Rajkumar*--Shanmugapriya** SATHYABAMA DEEMED UNIVERSITY jam_vilray110@yahoo.co.in *Student **Lecturer are some holes on the back-plate for which act as dampers ABSTRACT: to damp the membrane motion for optically flat This paper deals with the detection of sleep apnea. Even microphone frequency response. The sounds produced though many instruments are developed in the detection of during inhalation and exhalation is given to the condenser sleep apnea, its not much reliable. This is because these microphone. The voltage variations produced by it are instruments use only a single sensor for detecting apnea. amplified and integrated to obtain a consolidated pattern. So there is a great need to design a proper instrument This integrated signal may then be sent to a computer for which will detect sleep apnea with great reliability. This digital analysis or to a micro-controller. The turbulence is can be accomplished by using three sensors instead of one. produced due to breathing both during inhalation and Those sensors which I have used for detection and exhalation. Hence, the respiration rate measured from the respiration monitoring are microphone sensor, optooutput of the microphone sensor will actually correspond electronic abdominal sensor and pulse plethysmographic to twice the actual respiration rate. Hence, appropriate sensor. The principle and basic block diagram for each correction for this must be applied. type of sensor is used. The idea is to include all these sensors in a single respiration monitoring device to gain advantage of each sensor in a single respiration monitoring device to gain the advantage of each sensor and that of multiple sensors which is discussed at the end of paper.

INTRODUCTION:
Apnea is a Greek word which means without breathing. Sleep apnea is a breathing disorder characterized by brief interruptions of breathing during sleep. There are two primary types of sleep apnea and one combination. They are obstructive sleep apnea, central sleep apnea and mixed sleep apnea. Obstructive sleep apnea is an involuntary pause in breathing air cannot flow in or out of the persons nose or mouth. Central sleep apnea is less common and occurs when the brain doesnt send the right signals to start the breathing muscles. Mixed sleep apnea is a combination of the two.

Fig 1: Interpretation of microphone sensor signal As shown in the Fig 1, the first signal is the signal pattern for normal respiration. It can be seen that there is higher increase in amplitude and frequency during expiration when compared to inspiration as the turbulence caused due to exhalation is more when compared to inhalation .Thus the microphone picks up more sound during expiration. The second signal in the figure was recorded under artificially created apnea condition .It shows a voltage signal close to zero for a long period due to absence of respiration after which there is increase in amplitude due to deep inspiration after apnea. The interval gives an idea of the apnea duration, time interval and nature of apnea. It may be due to airway obstruction .The Apnea Index (AI) may be calculated by counting the number of such apneic events occurring in an hour.

BIOSENSORS AND TRANSDUCERS:

Sensors and transducers are devices which are used for making measurements of mechanical thermal, electrical and chemical quantities. The sensor is responsive to changes in the quantity to be measured for example temperature, position or chemical concentration. Transducer is a device which converts one form of energy into another.

MICROPHONE SENSOR:
As we breathe in and breathe out sound is produced. These sound waves produced on account of inhalation and exhalation is used to monitor the respiration rate. Changes in spacing between the diaphragm and a backing plate, due to impinging sound waves, give rise to a voltage variation across the terminals of the capacitor. The microphone sensor is capable of generating an output voltage of upto 1 to 5 mV in response to the breath sounds. Condenser microphone consists basically of a flexible metallic diaphragm placed very close to a rigid metallic back-plate, the two forming the plates of an electrical condenser. There

OPTOELECTRONIC TRANSDUCER:
Breathing produces the movement of body parts like the chest and the abdomen. The motion of these parts can be used to monitor the respiration of a patient. The sensor is a contacting motion sensor. The movement of the abdomen is transferred to the force summing member that is made of an elastomer. The elastomer then transfers the movement to a T-diaphragm. The vertical portion of the T diaphragm is made up of polyester and the horizontal portion is made up of polycarbonate. The T diaphragm intercepts the light from an LED as it moves down into a slot. (Refer to the diaphragm below). The light from the LED is made to fall

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on the base of the transistor which is open. The setup comprising of the LED and photo-transistor is called the photo-interrupter. The interruption occurs only when the person is breathing. When the interruption of the light to the photo transistor occurs, it stops conducting. As a result another transistor in the circuit is turned ON. This causes an LED to glow, indicating that the patient is

small apnea period (12N to 16N), after which the person goes into normal respiration mode (16N to 28N).

Fig 5: Interpretation of pulse plethysmographic sensor signal.

RESULT AND OBSERVATION:

The proposed system was developed using three sensors and the signals from the sensor output was processed using MATLAB. By using three sensors in a single instrument the reliability and accuracy was in a greater side when compared with instruments using a single sensor. Comparing the results with other instruments, we obtained that the proposed system detects 92.3% of the annotated apneas, and produced 5.7% false alarms.

Fig 4: Interpretation of abdominal sensor signal breathing. A buzzer/alarm is sounded when there is no breathing for a specified period. As seen from Fig 4, normally the signal has a zero value when there is no respiration. During inspiration there is an increase in signal amplitude from zero and remains constant at that value and comes back to zero at the time of expiration. The last signal in the figure was recorded under artificially created apnea condition .It shows a voltage signal equal to zero for a long period due to absence of respiration after which there is increase in amplitude due to deep inspiration after apnea. The interval gives an idea of the start of apnea, duration and nature of apnea. It may be central apnea where there is no signal sent by the brain stem to the respiratory muscles and usually occurring in premature infants. .The Apnea Index (AI) may be calculated by counting the number of such apneic events occurring in an hour.

REFERENCES:
(1) Peter Varady et.al, On-line Detecting of Sleep Apnea During Critical Care Monitoring, proceedings of the 22nd Annual EMBS International Conference, July 2328, 2000, Chicago IL, pp 1299-1301. (2) Sokwoo Rhee et.al, Artifact-Resistant Power-Efficient Design of Finger Ring Plethysmographic sensor , IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 48, No. 7, July 2001, pp 795-805. (3) Robert P. Schnall1 et.al, Periodic, Profound Peripheral VasoconstrictionA New Marker of Obstructive Sleep Apnea, SLEEP Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 22, No. 7, 1999, pp 939946. (4) M. J. Hayes et.al ,Quantitative investigation of artefact in photo-plethysmography and pulseoximetry for respiratory exercise testing, in Proc.CNVD 97 Frontiers in Computer-Aided Visualization of Vascular Functions 1998, pp. 117 124. (5) S. Bellet et.al, Continuous electrocardiographic Monitoring during automobile driving, Amer. J. Cardiol, Vol: 22, pp 856-968. (6) N. J. Holter, New method for heart studies: Continuous Electrocardiography of active subjects over long periods is now practical, Science, vol. 134, p. 1214, 1961. (7) White DP et.al, Assessment of accuracy and Analysis time of a novel device to monitor sleep and Breathing in the home, Sleep 1995 vol: 18, pp11526.

PULSE PLETHYSMOGRAPHIC SENSOR:

A simple heart-beat transducer can be made from an infrared LED and an infrared photo-transistor. It works because skin acts as reflective surface for infrared light. The IR reflectivity of ones skin depends on the density of the blood in it. Blood density rises and falls with the pumping action of the heart. So the intensity of infrared reflected by the skin (and thus transmitted to the phototransistor) rises and falls with each heartbeat. The first signal as shown in Fig 5, represents the heart-beat under normal respiratory conditions. The high peak represents expiration of air and the small negative peaks represents inspiration of air. In the last signal there is a period of normal respiration (0N to 12N) followed by a

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