A SVM-Based Algorithm to Diagnose Sleep Apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) is a breathing disorder presenting during sleep. Although polysomnography (PSG) is the gold standard to diagnose OSAS, it is an expensive method that is quite complicated to use. Worse, it takes a long time between testing and getting a diagnosis from PSG. Thus, we have designed an algorithm aimed at diagnosing OSAS in a more efficient manner. First, blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) data are processed to obtain statistical features, which are then trained to establish a classification model based on a support vector machine (SVM) strategy; the resulting SVM model performs the diagnosis of OSAS. Furthermore, in order to allow remote diagnosis, we combine our algorithm with a monitoring system. To achieve this, physiological data are collected from a smart phone and then uploaded to the SVM model in the cloud. Once processed, a diagnosis report is returned to the smart phone. A preliminary evaluation of our algorithm based on real-world data is extremely promising as we find its accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity to be 90.2%, 87.6%, and 94.1%, respectively.