Unsupervised Detection of Multiple Sleep Stages Using a Single FMCW Radar

Abstract

The paper proposes a unsupervised method for detecting the three stages of sleep—wake, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and non-REM sleep—using biosignals obtained from a 61 GHz single frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar. To detect the subject’s sleep stages based on non-learning techniques, the breathing and movement information characteristic of each sleep stage was extracted from the radar signals of the subject acquired in the sleep state and used as the feature factor tailored to the research objective. The experimental results derived from the clinical data obtained in the actual polysomnography (PSG) environment using FMCW radar show an average of 68% similarity to the actual three sleep stages observed in PSG. These results indicate the feasibility of using the FMCW radar sensor as an alternative to the conventional PSG-based method that poses multiple limitations to sleep-stage detection.