Simulated central apnea detection using the pressure variance

This paper presents use of an unobtrusive pressure sensor array for simulated central apnea detection. Data was collected from seven volunteers who performed a series of regular breathing and breath holding exercises to simulate central apneas. Results of the feature extraction from the breathing signals show that breathing events may be differentiated with epoch based variance calculations. Two approaches were considered: the single sensor approach and the multisensor vote approach. The multisensor vote approach can decrease false positives and increase the value of Matthew's Correlation Coefficient. The effect of lying position on correct classification was investigated by modifying the multisensor vote approach to reduce false positives segments caused by the balistocardiogram signal and as such increase sensitivity while maintaining a low false positive rate. Intersubject classification results had low variability in both approaches.