SOMNOgraph

Self-managed, home-based recording of the quality of sleep

Motivation: Around 30% of women and men in Germany suffer from clinically relevant sleep disorders. These can be the cause of fatal traffic accidents, depression, the decline in economic productivity, cancer and diabetes. The limited capacity of sleep laboratories creates a need for outpatient, easy-to-use sleep measurement systems.

Goal: Development of a wireless measurement system for the independent recording of sleep quality at home.

The core elements of the project include system miniaturisation, ensuring a comfortable fit, increased application safety, multimodal sensor data processing and user-friendliness of all components (for patients and medical staff). The system can thus increase the quality of sleep in the future.

Technological approach

  • Miniaturized sensors to measure the required parameters for a meaningful sleep analysis (hypnogram)
  • Textile headband, to hold the developed instrumentation to ensure comfortable wearing
  • User interface and data management unit as well as interfaces for secure transfer of measurement data to a cloud server
  • Pre-evaluation of the measurement data and provision of the results in the appropriate level of detail depending on the user group (patient / family doctor / sleep medicine experts)
  • User-friendly design of all interaction interfaces (headband and software components) and validation in laboratory studies

Patient and user involvement

At HFC, we are primarily responsible for ensuring the usability of the developed components. All prototypes and training concepts are developed on the basis of requirement analyses with potential users. During the course of development, the prototypes of hardware and software are tested with users and patients at an early stage in order to ensure a high level of user experience. To validate usability and measurement results, tests are carried out with patients in both the sleep laboratory and the home environment.

Partners

  • SOMNOmedics GmbH (consortium coordinator)
  • Hahn-Schickard-Gesellschaft für angewandte Forschung e. V.
  • Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin – Interdisziplinäres Schlafmedizinisches Zentrum
  • HFC Human-Factors-Consult GmbH
  • 1,84 Mio. € (of which 66% is funded by the BMBF) / 05/2017 – 04/2020