Sleep Posture Detection Using an Accelerometer Placed on the Neck

Sleep position monitoring is key when attempting to address posture triggered sleep disorders. Many studies have explored sleep posture detection from a dedicated physical sensing channel exploiting optimum body locations, such as the torso; or alternatively non-contact approaches. But, little work has been done to try to detect sleep position from a body location which, whilst being suboptimal for that purpose, does however allow for better extraction of more critical biomarkers from other sensing modalities, making possible multi-modal monitoring in certain clinical applications. This work presents two different approaches, at varying levels of complexity, for detecting 4 main sleep positions (supine, prone, lateral right and lateral left) from accelerometry data obtained by a single wearable device placed on the neck. An ultra light-weight threshold-based model is presented in this work, in addition to an Extra-Trees classifier. The threshold-based model was able to achieve 95% average accuracy and 0.89 F1-score on out-of-sample data, showing that it is possible to obtain a moderately high classification performance using a simple rule-based model. The ExtraTrees classifier, on the other hand, was able to achieve 99 % average accuracy and 0.99 average F1-score using only 25 base estimators with maximum depth of 20. Both models show promise in detecting sleep posture with high accuracy when collecting the signals from a neck-worn accelerometer sensor.