Sleep Apnea is a serious sleep disorder in which breathing starts and stops impulsively. There are many forms of sleep apnea: Obstructive Sleep Apnea, Central sleep apnea and Complex sleep apnea. Obstructive Sleep Apnea disorder involves trouble in breathing during sleep accompanied with loud snoring. In such cases, if any equipment is there, which can awake the person from sleep during breathlessness. So that patient can feel comfortable. In the present project an obstructive sleep apnea preventing and treating bed is developed.
The main motive of this project is to provide an alternative method to surgical treatments. In surgical methods, doctors used to remove the tongue base with the help of laser treatment. This will create discomfort to the patients. Present project is totally a non-invasive approach, which will never cause any discomfort to the patients. The project comprises of pulse oximeter, servomotor, suspension bed interfaced to the Raspberry PI 3 microcontroller [1]. It is programmed using python. Pulse oximeter detects the pulse rate and oxygen saturation level of the patients. Servomotor is attached under the patient's bed. Pulse oximeter is inserted to the fingertip of the patient. Normal oxygen saturation level is 90 to 95%. When the oxygen saturation level decreases below 90%, the pulse oximeter sends the signal to the servomotor to tilt the bed at three different angles namely 20°, 40°, 60°. This tilting of bed brings the oxygen saturation level back to normal and thus prevents breathlessness in patients. In addition to this, Raspberry pi 3 micro controller with the help of GSM module sends an alert message in the form of SMS to the doctor's mobile phone [2]. Thereby, this prevents the patients from obstructive sleep apnea.
This project has discussed the development of preventing and treating bed. The objectives were to develop necessary hardware, software to measure oxygen saturation level and prevent sleep apnea if saturation level falls outside of threshold limits and send an alert message to doctor via SMS.