In-ear Biosignal Recording System: A Wearable For Automatic Whole-night Sleep Staging

Abstract

In this work, we present a low-cost and light-weight wearable sensing system that can monitor bioelectrical signals generated by electrically active tissues across the brain, the eyes, and the facial muscles from inside human ears. Our work presents two key aspects of the sensing, which include the construction of electrodes and the extraction of these biosignals using a supervised non-negative matrix factorization learning algorithm. To illustrate the usefulness of the system, we developed an autonomous sleep staging system using the output of our proposed in-ear sensing system. We prototyped the device and evaluated its sleep stage classification performance on 8 participants for a period of 1 month. With 94% accuracy on average, the evaluation results show that our wearable sensing system is promising to monitor brain, eyes, and facial muscle signals with reasonable fidelity from human ear canals.