Parameter set selection and classification of sleep phases tracing biovital data

To assess the quality of a person’s sleep, it is essential to examine the sleep behaviour by identifying the several sleep stages, their durations and sleep cycles. The established and gold standard procedure for sleep stage scoring is overnight polysomnography (PSG) with the Rechtschaffen and Kales (R-K) method. Unfortunately, the conduct of PSG is time-consuming and unfamiliar for the subjects and might have an impact of the recorded data. To avoid the disadvantages with PSG, it is important to make further investigations in low-cost home diagnostic systems. For this intention it is necessary to find suitable bio vital parameters for classifying sleep stages without any physical impairments at the same time. Due to the promising results in several publications we want to analyse existing methods for sleep stage classification based on the parameters body movement, heartbeat and respiration. Our aim was to find different behaviour patterns in the several sleep stages. Therefore, the average values of 15 whole-night PSG recordings -obtained from the ‘DREAMS Subjects Database’- where analysed in the light of heartbeat, body movement and respiration with 10 different methods