Efficacy of Positional Therapy Prototype for Patients with Positional Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is the most prevalent sleep-disordered breathing problems. Approximately 56% of patients with OSA have position-dependent obstructive sleep apnea (POSA), namely that the frequency of apneas is affected by sleeping positions. In this paper, we have proposed a positional therapy (PT) prototype that obtains physiological signals by recording the chest respiratory and gesture movements. The PT-prototype consists of software to analyze and classify body movements from the acceleration and pressure sensors. The aim of positional therapy (PT) is to prevent patients from the effect of the supine sleep position on snoring. The device records the behavioral signals of body position and vibration when the patient lies in the supine position. The results were compared with the gold standard measurement scheme, such as the laboratory polysomnogram (PSG), for reasonable validity in assessing the sleep physiology of health and disease. The correlation coefficient between PSG and PT-prototype was high (> 0.90) for the lateral/supine body position composed of 24 lying subjects. In summary, this PT-prototype has high efficiency as an alternative method for the prevention of sleep-disordered breathing in patients and thus has great potential for monitoring at home.