Smart pajamas can monitor sleep apnea and other disorders at home and send the results to your smartphone

If you’ve ever had to endure a sleep study, you know it’s hardly the easiest way to catch some Z’s.Now, researchers may have developed the solution: comfortable, washable “smart pajamas” that can monitor sleep disorders at home — no sticky patches, no bulky equipment and no clinic visits required.“Poor sleep has huge effects on our physical and mental health, which is why proper sleep monitoring is vital,” said Luigi Occhipinti, a professor at the University of Cambridge who led the research.“However, the current gold standard for sleep monitoring, polysomnography or PSG, is expensive, complicated and isn’t suitable for long-term use at home.”While home devices like sleep tests are simpler than PSG, Occhipinti said they often focus on just one condition and can be bulky or uncomfortable.

Wearable devices, like smartwatches, are more convenient but only guess at your sleep quality, making them ineffective for monitoring sleep disorders.“We need something that is comfortable and easy to use every night, but is accurate enough to provide meaningful information about sleep quality,” Occhipinti said. To develop the “smart pajamas,” Occhipinti and his team built on their earlier work with a smart choker designed for people with speech impairments.They re-engineered fabric sensors to detect tiny skin movements, enabling them to monitor breathing — even when the pajamas are worn loosely around the neck and chest.They also created a machine learning model, called SleepNet, that uses the signals captured by the sensors to identify six different sleep states: nasal breathing, mouth breathing, snoring, teeth grinding, central sleep apnea and obstructive sleep apnea.The pajamas were tested on both healthy individuals and those with sleep apnea, detecting sleep states with an impressive 98.6% accuracy. A special starching process improves the durability of the sensors, so they can be tossed into the washing machine without losing their effectiv...