Effect of background sound and impact of snore episode length normalization on snore-based apnea diagnosis

Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a serious sleep disorder. OSA is commonly associated with snoring but it is not fully utilized in diagnosis. Snoring contains pseudoperiodic (“pitch of snoring”) packets of energy that produces the characteristic vibrating sounds familiar to us. Our hypothesis is that the pitch of snoring carries information on the state of the upper airways enabling us to characterize it. Snore Related Sounds (SRS) have the advantage as they can be acquired via non-contact measurements cheaply. However, in practice, it is likely that SRS may be corrupted by background interference such as bed sounds, duvet sounds and speech sounds (collectively referred to as “Other Sounds”, OS).