HealthGear: Automatic Sleep Apnea Monitoring and Detection on your Mobile Phone

System

We built HealthGear to monitor, visualize, and analyze physiological signals in real time. Non-invasive sensors sent data over Bluetooth to a mobile phone, which stored, transmitted, and analyzed the readings and presented them to the user. Our first prototype used a blood oximeter to monitor blood oxygen and pulse during sleep, together with two algorithms for detecting possible sleep apnea events. We evaluated the complete system in an at-home study with 20 volunteers.

HealthGear hardware.

At-home sleep study

Twenty volunteers, 80% of them men and ranging in age from 25 to 65, wore HealthGear for one night in their own homes. Thirty percent described themselves as healthy; the remainder knew or suspected that they had sleep apnea. Every participant collected data successfully. The algorithms identified all three previously diagnosed cases and flagged one severe and two mild cases among participants who suspected the condition. Participants rated comfort at 4.2 and the experience at 3.8 on five-point scales.

Those findings require an important qualification. Our study did not collect simultaneous polysomnography, the clinical reference test, or obtain manual labels from a physician. It therefore could not measure sensitivity, specificity, or screening accuracy. The additional cases flagged by HealthGear were possible events, not clinical diagnoses.

Publications and patent

Conference paper
PDF DOI
Cite
Formatted citation

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas (2006). HealthGear: A Real-Time Wearable System for Monitoring and Analyzing Physiological Signals. International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN'06), 61-64. https://doi.org/10.1109/BSN.2006.27

BibTeX
@inproceedings{oliver2006healthgear,
  author = {Nuria Oliver and Fernando Flores-Mangas},
  title = {{HealthGear}: A Real-Time Wearable System for Monitoring and Analyzing Physiological Signals},
  booktitle = {International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN'06)},
  year = 2006,
  doi = {10.1109/BSN.2006.27},
  pages = {61--64},
  cites = 397,
  citesdate = {2026-03-23},
  publisher = {IEEE}
}

HealthGear: A Real-Time Wearable System for Monitoring and Analyzing Physiological Signals

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas
International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN'06) · 2006
Journal paper
DOI
Cite
Formatted citation

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas (2007). HealthGear: Automatic sleep apnea detection and monitoring with a mobile phone. Journal of Communications (JCM) 2(2), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.4304/jcm.2.2.1-9

BibTeX
@article{oliver2007healthgear,
  author = {Oliver, Nuria and Flores-Mangas, Fernando},
  title = {HealthGear: Automatic sleep apnea detection and monitoring with a mobile phone},
  journal = {Journal of Communications (JCM)},
  year = 2007,
  volume = 2,
  number = 2,
  pages = {1--9},
  doi = {10.4304/jcm.2.2.1-9},
  cites = 116,
  citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}

HealthGear: Automatic sleep apnea detection and monitoring with a mobile phone

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas
Journal of Communications (JCM) · 2007
Patent
Cite
Formatted citation

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas, Howard Dane, Edward Lang, Ruben Sanchez, Mike Sinclair, Aston Tan, Richard Thompson (2007). Mobile, personal and non-intrusive health monitoring and analysis system.

BibTeX
@patent{oliver2007healthmonitoring,
  author = {Oliver, Nuria and Flores-Mangas, Fernando and Dane, Howard and Lang, Edward and Sanchez, Ruben and Sinclair, Mike and Tan, Aston and Thompson, Richard},
  title = {Mobile, personal and non-intrusive health monitoring and analysis system},
  number = {11/195338},
  type = {patentus},
  year = 2007,
  note = {Priority 2005-08-01, Filed 2005-08-01, Published 2007-02-01},
  cites = 254
}

Mobile, personal and non-intrusive health monitoring and analysis system

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas, Howard Dane, Edward Lang, Ruben Sanchez, Mike Sinclair, Aston Tan, Richard Thompson
2007

Videos

Presentations