Seeing if patients get a good night's sleep can now be done from home with a wireless sleep monitoring device, according to IMEC, a research outfit based in Belgium.

The wireless sleep staging system, part of IMEC's Human++ program, and developed with its Dutch affiliate the Holst Centre, is a lightweight headset that can create sleep profiles, or hypnograms, of patients from the comfort of their own beds.

"It's more realistic," Julien Penders, program manager of the Holst Centre, tells DOTmed News, referring to the profiles created by the system. "If you have patients going to the hospital, they don't sleep the same way they do at home."

The headset uses nodes to record brain activity with a two-channel electroencephalogram (EEG); eye movement with a two-channel electro-oculogram (EOG); and chin muscle movement with a single-channel electromyogram (EMG).

IMEC claims its device measures up to standard, hospital-based polysomnography (PSG) machines. Pre-clinical trials at the Andre Vesale Hospital in Belgium involved 12 healthy subjects who slept while connected to both the wireless device and a PSG machine. The two hypnograms -- hand-scored by clinicians -- were compared side-by-side. According to IMEC, the results were 80 percent in agreement - which is what they were hoping for.

"If you ask two different clinical experts to look at the same signals," says Penders, "[their scores] would be 80-90 percent similar, so this is in the right range."

Penders is most proud of the amplifier, the part of the system that converts the micro-volts from the electrodes into volts, filters out the noise, and passes the signal to the radio for transmission. "Low power and high performance makes the system very good," he says.

The battery life for the device is around 16 hours, enough for even a hard night's sleep. But Penders hopes to make the battery smaller, and longer-lasting, so users won't have to recharge it every day.

The immediate next step is to add an algorithm to the device to automatically score hypnograms. After that, its future depends on what industrial partner IMEC -- a research company that does not manufacture or market its own products -- teams up with.

Penders believes it could go in at least two directions: a consumer lifestyle application, for consumers who want information on how well they sleep; or a clinical, high-end screening device to save patients an overnight stay at the hospital and the long wait for the sleep rooms to be accessible.

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