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Objective: In this study, a wearable actigraphy recording device with low sampling rate (1 Hz) for power saving and data reduction and a high accuracy wake-sleep scoring method for the assessment of sleep were developed., Methods: The developed actigraphy recorder was successfully applied to overnight recordings of 81 subjects with simultaneous polysomnography (PSG) measurements. The total length of recording reached 639.8 h. A wake-sleep scoring method based on the concept of movement density evaluation and adaptive windowing was proposed. Data from subjects with good (N = 43) and poor (N = 16) sleep efficiency (SE) in the range of 52.7-97.42% were used for testing. The Bland-Altman technique was used to evaluate the concordance of various sleep measurements between the manual PSG scoring and the proposed actigraphy method., Results: For wake-sleep staging, the average accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and kappa coefficient of the proposed system were 92.16%, 95.02%, 71.30%, and 0.64, respectively. For the assessment of SE, the accuracy of classifying the subject with good or poor SE reached 91.53%. The mean biases of SE, sleep onset time, wake after sleep onset, and total sleep time were -0.95%, 0.74 min, 2.84 min, and -4.3 min, respectively., Conclusion: These experimental results demonstrate the robustness and reliability of our method using limited activity information to estimate wake-sleep stages during overnight recordings., Significance: The results suggest that the proposed wearable actigraphy system is practical for the in-home screening of objective sleep measurements and objective evaluation of sleep improvement after treatment.

Objective: In this paper, the genetic fuzzy inference system based on expert knowledge for automatic sleep staging was developed., Methods: Eight features, including temporal and spectrum analyses of the EEG and EMG signals, were utilized as the input variables. The fuzzy rules and the fuzzy sets were constructed based on expert knowledge and the distributions of feature values at different sleep stages. Three experiments were designed to develop and evaluate the proposed system. PSGs of 32 healthy subjects and 16 subjects with insomnia were included in the experiment to develop and evaluate the proposed method. Finally, a complete sleep scoring system integrating two fuzzy inference models with robust performance on various subject groups is developed., Results: The overall agreement and kappa coefficient of this integrated system applied to PSG data from 8 subjects with good sleep efficiency, 8 subjects with poor sleep efficiency and 8 subjects with insomnia were 86.44 % and 0.81, respectively., Conclusion: Due to the high performance of the proposed system, it is expected to integrate the proposed method with various PSG systems for sleep monitoring in clinical or homecare applications in the future., Significance: An automatic sleep staging system integrating knowledge of the experts in scoring of PSG data and the elasticity of fuzzy systems in reasoning and decision making is proposed and the robustness and clinical applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated on data from healthy subjects and subjects with insomnia.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most frequent cardiac arrhythmia seen in clinical practice. Several therapeutical approaches have been developed to terminate the AF and the effects are evaluated by the reduction of the wavelet number after the treatments. Most of the previous studies focus on modeling and analysis the mechanism, and the characteristic of AF. But no one discusses about the prediction of the result after the drug treatment. This paper is the first study to predict whether the drug treatment for AF is active or not. In this paper, the linear autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (ARX) that models the system output-input relationship by solving linear regression equations with least squares method was developed and applied to estimate the effects of pharmacological therapy on AF. Recordings (224-site bipolar recordings) of plaque electrode arrays placed on the right and left atria of pigs with sustained AF induced by rapid atrial-pacing were used to train and test the ARX models. The cardiac mapping data from twelve pigs treated with intravenous administration of antiarrhythmia drug, propafenone (PPF) or dl-sotalol (STL), was evaluated. The recordings of cardiac activity before the drug treatment were input to the model and the model output reported the estimated wavelet number of atria after the drug treatment. The results show that the predicting accuracy rate corresponding to the PPF and STL treatment was 100% and 92%, respectively. It is expected that the developed ARX model can be further extended to assist the clinical staffs to choose the effective treatments for the AF patients in the future.