Dec 11, 2006, 11:46 GMT
Erlangen, Germany - People with sleeping disorders will soon be able to undergo medical examinations at home thanks to a 'portable sleep lab' developed in Germany.
The device monitors the patient's breathing pattern, sleeping position, blood oxygen concentration and brain, heart, eye and muscle functions, relaying the data directly to a physician.
The information allows the underlying cause of the disorder to be diagnosed and an appropriate treatment to be prescribed, without the patient having to spend costly time in a sleep clinic.
The low-cost device was developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in collaboration with industrial and clinical partners.
The monitoring instrument can be strapped on unassisted by patients at home, and does not restrict their freedom of movement, says Christian Weigand, head of the IIS research group for medical communication and sensor systems.
'We have observed more than 50 patients under the usual sleep laboratory conditions, who at the same time were connected to our device. In this way, we were able to collect two sets of data and compare the results,' he said.
The bedside sleep laboratory is strapped to the patient's chest and transmits the recorded data over a standard wireless Bluetooth connection to a local base station in the patient's home.
This terminal automatically processes the data and transmits it via a custom-designed server over a secure, encrypted link to a terminal in the doctor's office.
The device is currently being tested on a total of 30 sleep- disorder patients at university hospitals in Marburg and Nuremberg.
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