Automatic picking of snore events from overnight breath sound recordings

Snoring is one of the earliest symptoms of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA). However, the unavailability of an objective snore definition is a major obstacle in developing automated snore analysis system for OSA screening. The objectives of this paper is to develop a method to identify and extract snore sounds from a continuous sound recording following an objective definition of snore that is independent of snore loudness. Nocturnal sounds from 34 subjects were recorded using a non-contact microphone and computerized data-acquisition system. Sound data were divided into non-overlapping training (n = 21) and testing (n = 13) datasets. Using training dataset an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier were trained for snore and non-snore classification. Snore sounds were defined based on the key observation that sounds perceived as 'snores' by human are characterized by repetitive packets of energy that are responsible for creating the vibratory sound peculiar to snorers. On the testing dataset, the accuracy of ANN classifier ranged between 86 - 89%. Our results indicate that it is possible to define snoring using loudness independent, objective criteria, and develop automated snore identification and extraction algorithms.