SeSaMe Seminar by Prof Vera Goebel & Prof Thomas Plagemann

Title: Obstructive Sleep Apnea Detection with Consumer Electronics
Speaker: Professor Vera Goebel & Professor Thomas Plagemann
Date & Time: 2nd August 2017 (Wed), 11.00am - 12.00pm
Venue: The Hangar Seminar Room

Abstract: Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder that causes repeatedly reduced respiration or no airflow in a period of time during sleep. OSA does not only cause tiredness during daytime, but can also cause diabetes, cardiac problems and other severe health issues. OSA is rather common, but unfortunately severely under diagnosed. For example, it is assumed that approximately 25% of the 35+ aged population in Norway has OSA, but it is only diagnosed for less than 10% of them. Since patients only experience the symptom of tiredness it is hard for a physician to suspect OSA and advice a costly examination in a sleep laboratory (polysomnography).

In the recently started CESAR project we investigate how off-the-shelf consumer electronics, like sensor sets from Bitalino or Cooking Hacks can be used to detect with very low costs at home OSA. We present in this talk some early results on the performance of classical Machine Learning (ML) techniques to detect OSA events in physiological signals. We used in this study the data sets from the Physionet Databases and could show that some ML techniques achieve an accuracy of over 90%. Another encouraging insight from this study is, that not all physiological sensors that are used in polysomnography (the gold standard for OSA diagnosis) are needed to achieve a high accuracy of OSA event detection.

IWe hope to stimulate a discussion on the implications of these findings, our ongoing and future research activities as well as our responsibilities as Computer Science researchers in eHealth.

Bio:Professor Vera Goebel is professor in the Distributed Multimedia Systems group at the Department of Informatics of the University of Oslo, Norway. She has published over 150 papers in peer-reviewed conferences and journals. She obtained a PhD degree from the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 1994 and an MSc from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany in 1989. Her current research interests are medical sensor networks, complex event processing, distributed systems, database systems, and operating systems.

Thomas Plagemann is Professor at the University of Oslo since 1996. Currently, he leads the research group in Distributed Multimedia Systems at the Department of Informatics. He has a Dr.SC degree from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in 1994 and received in 1995 the Medal of the ETH Zurich for his excellent Dr.Scient thesis. His research interests include multimedia systems, protocols architectures for the Future Internet, networked sensors and event based systems, mobile systems, and mHealth He has published over 150 papers in peer reviewed journals, conferences and workshops in his field. He serves as Associate Editor for ACM Transactions of Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, and Computer Communications; and as Editor-in-Chief for the Springer Multimedia Systems Journal. He has successfully given tutorials at IDMS 1999, ACM Multimedia 2001, PROMS 2001, DAIS 2002, MIPS 2004, ConTel 2005, and ACM Multimedia 2009.