Design and Trial Deployment of a Practical Sleep Activity Pattern Monitoring System

Sleep disorders are common in the elderly, can be distressing to both the elderly and their carers, and often contribute to institutionalisation when the disruptive night behaviour of the older person exerts its toll on the carer. The main way of determining Sleep Activity Pattern (SAP) and aberrant changes in the normal sleep/wake cycle is through verbal reports of the patient and his/her carer, information that can be subjective, incomplete and unreliable. An emerging modality for SAP monitoring is actigraphy1), involving the use of wearable sensors commonly based on accelerometers. To bring actigraphy to the next level in order to reap its benefit for the elderly population at large, one must consider its deployment in realistic settings such as nursing homes and in the homes of the subjects. In this paper we provide a brief account of the trial eployment of our SAP monitoring system in a nursing home, where data was collected from fifteen elderly residents for a period of two weeks each. Besides providing an objective basis for obtaining sleep related information from patients who are often unable to remember clearly how well they have slept, our system benefits staff and doctors by providing more accurate information as a supplement to the sleep diary, and hopefully even eliminate the need for the latter. Preliminary results are reported herein.