SlAction: Non-intrusive, Lightweight Obstructive Sleep Apnea Detection using Infrared Video
This addresses the problem of intrusive and inaccurate OSA diagnosis for approximately one billion affected people worldwide, offering a privacy-preserving alternative to current hospital-based methods.
The researchers tackled obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) detection by developing SlAction, a non-intrusive system using infrared video analysis of human motions during sleep, achieving an average F1 score of 87.6% and real-time inference in about 3 seconds on resource-constrained devices.
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a prevalent sleep disorder affecting approximately one billion people world-wide. The current gold standard for diagnosing OSA, Polysomnography (PSG), involves an overnight hospital stay with multiple attached sensors, leading to potential inaccuracies due to the first-night effect. To address this, we present SlAction, a non-intrusive OSA detection system for daily sleep environments using infrared videos. Recognizing that sleep videos exhibit minimal motion, this work investigates the fundamental question: "Are respiratory events adequately reflected in human motions during sleep?" Analyzing the largest sleep video dataset of 5,098 hours, we establish correlations between OSA events and human motions during sleep. Our approach uses a low frame rate (2.5 FPS), a large size (60 seconds) and step (30 seconds) for sliding window analysis to capture slow and long-term motions related to OSA. Furthermore, we utilize a lightweight deep neural network for resource-constrained devices, ensuring all video streams are processed locally without compromising privacy. Evaluations show that SlAction achieves an average F1 score of 87.6% in detecting OSA across various environments. Implementing SlAction on NVIDIA Jetson Nano enables real-time inference (~3 seconds for a 60-second video clip), highlighting its potential for early detection and personalized treatment of OSA.