A Minimalist Method Toward Severity Assessment and Progression Monitoring of Obstructive Sleep Apnea on the Edge

Artificial Intelligence-enabled applications on edge devices have the potential to revolutionize disease detection and monitoring in future smart health (sHealth) systems. In this study, we investigated a minimalist approach for the severity classification, severity estimation, and progression monitoring of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in a home environment using wearables. We used the recursive feature elimination technique to select the best feature set of 70 features from a total of 200 features extracted from polysomnogram. We used a multi-layer perceptron model to investigate the performance of OSA severity classification with all the ranked features to a subset of features available from either Electroencephalography or Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and time duration of SpO2 level. The results indicate that using only computationally inexpensive features from HRV and SpO2, an area under the curve of 0.91 and an accuracy of 83.97% can be achieved for the severity classification of OSA. For estimation of the apnea-hypopnea index, the accuracy of RMSE = 4.6 and R-squared value = 0.71 have been achieved in the test set using only ranked HRV and SpO2 features. The Wilcoxon-signed-rank test indicates a significant change (p < 0.05) in the selected feature values for a progression in the disease over 2.5 years. The method has the potential for integration with edge computing for deployment on everyday wearables. This may facilitate the preliminary severity estimation, monitoring, and management of OSA patients and reduce associated healthcare costs as well as the prevalence of untreated OSA.