Utilization of Chin EMG Variation During OSA Onset to Improve Apnea Classification

Chin EMG is traditionally used in sleep studies to determine rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. During REM chin EMG drops to its lowest levels. Some recent works have showed good accuracy in detecting obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) utilizing the chin EMG. In this work we studied the behavior of the chin EMG during apnea/hypopnea onset. The OSA and CSA onset showed steeper drop in the chin EMG activity compared with the hypopnea onset (with p<0.001). Utilizing features from chin EMG and oxygen saturation, the classification of 30-sec sleeping epoch gave an accuracy of 85% with high specificity (accuracy of detecting the normal epochs) of 92%. Although the sensitivity (the accuracy of detecting apnea/hypopnea epochs) was 67%, the sensitivity of the OSA-only epochs was relatively high (85%). Further studies are needed to explore the reason for chin EMG drop during apnea onset.