watching TV, working, driving, reading, or waking
up tired in the morning (MedlinePlus, 2017).
Currently, the medical method to diagnose sleep
apnea is performed with a polysomnography (AASM,
2017), (Guyton, 2011), (MedlinePlus, 2017). In this
technique, an oxygen mask is placed on the nose and
mouth of the patient while sleeping. Then, the device
records the patient’s breathing and it detects when the
sleep apnea occurs, as well as its duration. There are
other complementary tests that confirm SA, such as
electrocardiography (ECG), echocardiography,
thyroid test, or arterial blood test (MedlinePlus,
2017). Also, a non-invasive technique to detect sleep
apnea is to measure the patient chest movements. For
example, pressure transducers are placed on the
patients’ bed. When the patient inhales or exhales, the
pressure exerted on the bed changes. When a sleep
apnea occurs, the pressure of the body on the bed is
still for more than 10 seconds (Waters, 2019).
However, the patient must be in a specific position for
the breathing frequency detection. Another technique
is the Doppler radar, which measures the distances
between the radar and the chest of the patient. If
distances don’t change for more than 10 seconds, then
the sleep apnea alert is activated. Unfortunately, this
technique, in some cases, tends to be inaccurate (Lai,
2011). Recent experiments show that sleep apnea can
be detected using the Ultra-Wide Band (UWB)
technology (Fedele, 2015). UWB signals are used to
measure the distance between the target and the
device and the variations caused by the breathing
movement, (Abib, 2014), (Muller, 2015). An
advantage is that the power required to send a UWB
pulse is lower than other technologies (Muller, 2015).
In these papers, the method to detect sleep apnea is
through the detection of the breathing signal of the
patient. It is analyzed, and the sleep apnea is detected.
This process could be optimized in order to reduce the
time consumption of the process.
In this paper, a methodology to detect sleep apnea
is proposed using UWB signals without the need of
first obtaining the breathing signal. The rest of the
paper is divided as follows: Section II shows an
overview of the UWB technology to detect SA in
patients. Section III describes the proposed
methodology to detect sleep apnea. Section IV
presents the optimization of the proposal. Finally,
section V remarks some conclusions.
2 UWB TECHNOLOGY AND
BREATHING SIGNAL
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of
the United States of America (USA) defines UWB
technology as that employing devices that transmit
very short pulses that result in very wide transmission
bandwidths (Waters, 2009), (Pardiñas, 2017).
Typically, the largest pulse length considered as a
UWB pulse is on the order of nanoseconds. The
received energy signal is spread from close to dc to a
few GHz (Pardiñas, 2017). Another advantage of this
technology is that multipath effects can be
diminished, and it can penetrate through materials
such as walls, doors, and windows (Pardiñas, 2017).
When a signal is transmitted in an ideal
environment from point A to point B and is reflected
back to point A in a direct path without additional
reflections, it is called the direct path. The total
traveling time is known as time of flight T
R
. In a real
environment, the signal that arrives at point B is
composed of the direct path plus additional signals
reflected from different objects, as seen in Figure 1,
traveling longer paths and lasting for more than T
R
⁄2
seconds.
Figure 1: Received signal constructed from reflections of
the original signal off of scatterers.
Figure 1 shows the way that the received signal,
d
rT
(t), is constructed from different reflected signals
or paths d
r1
(t), d
r2
(t), d
r3
(t), etc. In the case of a
transceiver acting as a radar, the signals at point B are
reflected and redirected to point A, where they are
collected. This kind of UWB radar can be used to
obtain a breathing signal of a person, as shown in
Figure 2.
The transceiver targets the person and sends one
pulse, recording the reflected signal, called a
realization, for T
L
seconds, ensuring that all paths
have arrived. Doing this very fast and as many times
as needed, a signal representing the breathing can be
obtained. Figure 3 shows the waveform of a UWB
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