Apnea Detection Using Cardiac Rhythm and its Hardware Implementation

Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterized by pauses in breathing during sleep. Its detection is very important to avoid important disorders in the patients such as daytime fatigue and sleepiness, which might be very dangerous in certain work places. One of the methods to detect apnea is based in the cardiac rhythm, measuring some parameters which indicate the presence of respiration abnormalities. This work describes the used algorithm to detect apnea and its hardware implementation in an FPGA device for real time detection using the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal.