Towards Improving Sleep Quality Using Automatic Sleep Stage Classification and Binaural Beats.

Abstract

Sleep disorders are extremely common in today's society and are greatly affecting the health and safety of every person suffering from one. Over the last decades, Automatic Sleep Stage Classification (ASSC) systems have been developed to assist specialists in the sleep stage scoring process and therefore in the diagnosis of sleep disorders. Binaural beats are auditory phenomena that have been shown to have a positive impact in sleep quality and mental state. This paper introduces a framework that combines an ASSC system and a binaural beats generator in real time. Our goal is to pave the way for developing systems which could reproduce specific binaural beats depending on the detected sleep stage, in order to entrain the brain into a more efficient sleep. For the ASSC stage, different classifiers were evaluated using data signals retrieved from a public sleep stage signals database, corresponding to ten subjects. The complete framework was tested using the database signals and signals from a test subject, captured and processed in real time. Our proposed framework may lead to a fully automated system to improve sleep quality without the need of medication.