Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new wireless sleep analysis method.
Many people around the planet suffer from sleep disorders. These disorders are diagnosed in clinics using electrodes connected to the patient's body during sleep. This is the main disadvantage of the method. Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have a unique solution to this problem - they have created a device that allows you to analyze and monitor sleep remotely using radio waves.
The new method builds on previous work by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which used radio frequency signals to detect emotions and measure a person's walking speed at home. In both cases, radio waves are transmitted towards the person and then reflected back to the receiver. By analyzing the changes in the reflected waves, the system can learn a lot about the studied individual - up to changes in breathing and heart rate in case of various emotions.
The device itself looks like a small box, similar to a Wi-Fi router, that you can install at home. It contains the transmitter and receiver of RF signals. To analyze radio waves, researchers at MIT used a neural network to filter out radio signals reflected from various objects in the room.
When the new system was tested on 25 volunteers, the researchers found it was 80% accurate. This is comparable to the accuracy of the EEG, which is often used in sleep clinics. However, due to the fact that the device works without sensors and wires, it has a clear advantage over EEG.
The researchers' work is published on the MIT website.
Mikhail Romkin