Adequate sleep habits and sleep quality is as essential to our health as adequate intake of water and food. Long-term sleep losses have been associated with an increased risk of hypertension, heart diseases, diabetes, obesity, depression, and stroke. To measure and quantify sleep quality, and prevent/treat sleep disorders, clinical sleep tests are the gold standard.

Such a test is performed in a specialized sleep lab in a non-invasive over-night exam. However, access to the sleep labs is subject to long wait times in Windsor, across Canada and worldwide due to the limited availability of sleep lab facilities. Notably, only one fully operational sleep laboratory testing facility is currently available for patients in Windsor-Essex (Windsor Sleep Disorder Clinic). The cost of equipment and the need for a specialized technician during the overnight experiment are the two main limitations that explain why access to these specialized facilities is so limited and difficult. To facilitate the treatment and monitoring of sleep disorders, there is an ever-growing demand for sensing systems that can provide accessible but accurate assessment of sleep. The consumer grade sleep tracking sensing systems have popular general use, but they are inaccurate, unreliable, and uncertified particularly for sensing sleep disordered breathing. Therefore, an accessible, accurate and wearable devices remain a priority in the field of sleep research and sleep medicine.

The overall goal for this project is to provide a gold standard multi-sensor flexible ‘bend-aid’ like patch for physicians and researchers toidentify sleep patterns. The specific objectives are: (1) design breathing pattern recognition sensing system, (2) optimize material chemistry for flexibility and electronic interfacing, (3) optimize algorithm, manufacturing and cyber security, and (4) test and calibrate sensors against gold standard in the sleep lab.