Automatic identification of insomnia using optimal antisymmetric biorthogonal wavelet filter bank with ECG signals

Sleep is a fundamental human physiological activity required for adequate working of the human body. Sleep disorders such as sleep movement disorders, nocturnal front lobe epilepsy, insomnia, and narcolepsy are caused due to low sleep quality. Insomnia is one such sleep disorder where a person has difficulty in getting quality sleep. There is no definitive test to identify insomnia; hence it is essential to develop an automated system to identify it accurately. A few automated methods have been proposed to identify insomnia using either polysomnogram (PSG) or electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to automatically detect insomnia using only electrocardiogram (ECG) signals without combining them with any other physiological signals. In the proposed study, an optimal antisymmetric biorthogonal wavelet filter bank (ABWFB) has been used, which is designed to minimize the joint duration-bandwidth localization (JDBL) of the underlying filters. The L₁-norm feature is computed from the various wavelet sub-bands coefficients of ECG signals. The L₁ norm features are fed to various supervised machine learning classifiers for the automated detection of insomnia. In this work, ECG recordings of seven insomnia patients and six normal subjects are used from the publicly available cyclic alternating pattern (CAP) sleep database. We created ten different subsets of ECG signals based on annotations of sleep-stages, namely wake (W), S1, S2, S3, S4, rapid eye moment (REM), light sleep stage (LSS), slow-wave sleep (SWS), non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and W + S1+S2+S3+S4+REM for the automated identification of insomnia. Our proposed ECG-based system obtained the highest classification accuracy of 97.87%, F1-score of 97.39%, and Cohen's kappa value of 0.9559 for K-nearest neighbour (KNN) with the ten-fold cross-validation strategy using ECG signals corresponding to the REM sleep stage. The support vector machine (SVM) yielded the highest value of 0.99 for area under the curve with the ten fold cross-validation corresponding to REM sleep stage.