A Convolutional Neural Network Framework for Sleep Apnea Detection via Ballistocardiography Signals

Featured Application: One specific application of this work is sleep monitoring using non-invasive, low-cost devices, particularly for measuring the ballistocardiogram, aimed at detecting sleep disorders for non-medical, well-being-oriented monitoring. The clinical diagnosis of sleep apnea conventionally necessitates resource-intensive Polysomnography (PSG). We propose a weakly supervised framework to detect apnea using non-invasive Ballistocardiography (BCG), thereby addressing the critical scarcity of labeled BCG data. Instead of manual annotation, our pipeline transfers knowledge from a synchronized ECG signal, using it as a “teacher” to generate pseudo-labels for the BCG model. We formulated a User-Defined Function (UDF) that combines Heart Rate Variability and ECG-Derived Respiration to autonomously label the BCG windows. These pseudo-labels were subsequently employed to train a 1D Convolutional Neural Network. Testing on a public dataset, the CNN model achieved 71.8% accuracy against the pseudo-labels. When projected against the clinical ground truth, we estimate a true accuracy of 77.7%. These results validate that ECG-based supervision can effectively train low-cost home sensors without the bottleneck of manual medical annotation.