Wearable Movement Sensors for Detecting Periodic Limb Movement (PLMS) During Sleep

Abstract

Periodic limb movement disorder (PLMS) is sleeping situation in which the patient moves limb involuntarily throughout sleep. PLMS is different from restless legs syndrome (RLS) which takes place while the patient is awake as well as when asleep, and is a voluntary response to moving legs. The disorder occurs in 4% of all the adults and is most important in the elderly population and women. PLMS involves the movement of foot at an intervals of 20-40 seconds, usually in the first part of the sleep cycle. People suffering from the disorder can have extreme drowsiness through the daytime and wakefulness. Clinically the disease is diagnosed by the polysomnogram or PSG. The PSG method of detection is time-consuming as well as not that much cost effective and comfortable. Accordingly, a framework of PLMS detection through wearable movement sensor would be less time consuming and comfortable than the clinical one. Firstly, in this study a 3 axis-accelerometers is used to identify periodic limb movements in the course of sleep. The temperature of surrounding is also calculated with the on chip sensor of IMU sensor. Secondly, normal healthy subjects were recruited for measuring the PLMS movement for two hour during sleep. The existing experiment incorporated a different of age sets, it permitted to estimate the significance of PLMS from children’s to late middle age adult’s subjects. Neither of the study participant have any severe medical, psychiatric nor sleep disorder. Lastly, (ANOVA) one way analysis of variance is utilized for the statistical analysis to check whether the difference of means between different age groups is significant with PLMS Count. In the present study, a significance was found in the late-middle age patients with a comparatively great number of periodic limb movement action. Then presence of PLMS is not common in middle age subjects, whereas it is common in children and late-middle age. Thus, the purpose of the current study is to fabricate a wearable framework to measure PLMS movement in young children’s and older subjects.