A SmartBed for Non-obtrusive Physiological Monitoring During Sleep: The LAID Project

The individual experience of inadequate or insufficient sleep is one of the most common health issues in the industrialized world. The 65% of Italian population reports disturbed sleep experiences, while chronic sleep disorders affect about 10% of the population. The people with inadequate and unsatisfactory sleep often suffers drowsiness during the day associated with both somatic and mental disorders. For these reasons, the systematic and continuative monitoring of sleep is one of the main objectives in preventive, personalized and participatory sleep medicine. The purpose of this paper is to describe the architecture of a “smart mattress’’ (SmartBed) that is the main outcome of the Italian R&D project called LAID. SmartBed will be able to non-obtrusively collect physiological and environmental parameters and signals, to processing them and to provide information about the quality of sleep, the levels of stress, and more generally the well-being of an individual. Specifically, SmartBed will be able to estimate data relating to cardiorespiratory activity, movements, body position, snoring and environmental parameters. SmartBed aims to obtain a continuative and ecological assessment of sleep and well-being of a person, in order to improve his quality of life. SmartBed will be a fundamental tool for carrying out both longitudinal and epidemiological studies on the quality of sleep and life on general population.