An Approach for the Evaluation of Sleeping Behaviors Disorders in Patients with Cognitive Diseases: A Case Study

Abstract

Cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease concern a persons ability to perform daily activities. With the worsening of the disease, the decline of the brain's ability tends to disrupt also the sleep/waking cycle, which may cause sleep problems, night-time wandering, and agitation. It has been proved that there is a connection between sleeping disorders and the onset of cognitive disorders like Alzheimer. In this work we propose an approach for the analysis of the sleep of patients with Alzheimer(AD) in order to detect anomalous movements. In order to prove our approach we monitor two patients: a patient with very early AD and one with multiple sclerosis(MD), both have been monitored for a week. During the monitoring phase, a set of parameters has been acquired such as movements, electrodermal activity (EDA), heart rate (HR) and skin temperature. The results highlight some interesting findings in terms of the number of anomalous movements and the heart rate variation during these movements.