Obstructive sleep apnea detection based on electrocardiogram signal using one-dimensional convolutional neural network

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a respiratory obstruction that occurs during sleep and is often known as snoring. OSA is often ignored even though it can cause cardiovascular problems. Early diagnosis is needed for prevention towards worse complications. OSA clinical diagnosis can use polysomnography (PSG) while the patient is sleeping. The PSG examination includes calculating total apnea plus hypopnea every hour during sleep. However, PSG examination tends to be high cost, takes a long time, and is impractical. Since OSA is related to breathing and heart activity, the electrocardiogram (ECG) examination is an alternative tool in OSA analysis. Therefore, this study proposes OSA detection on single lead ECG using one dimensional (1D)-convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed CNN architecture consists of 4 convolutional layers, 4 pooling layers, 1 dropout layer, 1 flatten layers, 2 dropout layers, 1 dense layer with rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function, and 1 dense layer with SoftMax activation function. The proposed method was then tested on the ECG sleep apnea dataset from PhysioNet. The proposed model produces an accuracy of 92.69% with the average pooling scenario. The proposed method is expected to help clinicians in diagnosing OSA based on ECG signals.