The surrounding sensor approach - application to sleep apnea syndrome diagnosis based on image processing

This paper describes a new approach to understanding human physiological status through unrestrainedly monitoring his/her body movement. The sensors used for monitoring the human subject are not attached to the body but embedded into the surroundings. This paper clarifies the advantages of the surrounding sensors from the view point of system construction, monitoring of human body movement, and understanding of physiological status. This paper also reports a system based on this approach and proposes a new method of non-invasive and unrestrained diagnosis for sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) using the system. The effectiveness of the proposed method is proved by applying the experimental system to three SAS patients with the help of doctors and nurses at a hospital.