SOMNUS: A Sleep-Measuring Shirt Based on Chest Expansion and Respiratory Patterns

This paper presents a shirt embedded with simple capacitive sensors that accurately monitors the respiration of a sleeping person through chest expansion. It will also discuss a software package that, when coupled with this device, can determine sleep stages from the acquired data. Current sleep studies are the only medically accepted form of sleep health detection and diagnosis; due to the relatively high price of these studies, only persons with breathing-related disorders are referred to them. These studies depend on polysomnography, the use of various bodily signals for sleep detection; patients are often connected to over 20 sensors ranging from brain wave electrodes to blood oxygen trackers. The Somnus shirt is a comfortable, low-cost solution that could be used in the patient’s regular sleep setting. Through some preliminary testing, our respiration-monitoring prototype was able to produce respiration data similar to that of sensors employed in current sleep laboratories while achieving a higher level of comfort for the user; also, the software package was able to analyze sleep with accuracy comparable to current sleep laboratory technicians.