A high-availability architecture for continuous monitoring of sleep disorders Alexandru IOVANOVICI a,1 , Alexandru TOPIRCEANU a , Mihai UDRESCU a , Lucian PRODAN a and Stefan MIHAICUTA b a Politehnica University of Timisoara b ”Victor Babes” University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timisoara Abstract. We present a complete technical solution for continuously monitoring vital signs required for observing sleep apnoea events, one of the major sleep respiratory disorders. Based on industry accepted medical devices, we developed a GSM-based remote data acquisition and transfer module that is integrated via a set of web services into the server side of the application. The back-end is responsible with aggregating all the data, and, based on machine learning techniques, it provides a first level of filtering in order to warn about possible abnormalities. The proposed solution is currently under the test phase at the “Victor Babes” Hospital in Timisoara, Romania. Keywords. Apnea, Sleep Apnea Syndromes, Health Information Systems, Medical Devices Introduction Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is a disorder that consists of abnormal breathing pauses, irregular or superficial breathing that occurs during sleep [2, 11]. It has often been indicated as a serious, frequent but mostly underrated clinical problem. The reported incidence of apnoea varies, but there are about 1 in 4 men and 1 in 10 women with OSA in USA [1]. The morbidity risks entailed by the fact that many sleep apnoea cases are not discovered and treated in time are well documented by many comprehensive studies. Maybe the best known link is between sleep apnoea and cardiovascular problems, leading to hypertension, stroke and even death [13]. As such, we propose a monitoring framework that can improve the doctor-patient collaboration by providing real-time assessment of vital signs during sleep. This information should prove invaluable for doctors as they can monitor patients with sleep apnoea from a distance. Apart from this capability, it was essential to develop a filtering mechanism so that the physician can be pinpointed to relevant results, if any. Important cenerns arise form the strict requiremets for professional drivers to be screened for sleep disorders, this being a well known cause of fatigure and inducing posiblly fata sleepiness [3-6]. 1 Corresponding Author: Alexandru IOVANOVICI, Department of Computing, ACSA Laboratory, POLITEHNICA University Timisoara, 2 nd Vasile Parvan Street, Timisoara, Room B520, iovanalex@cs.upt.ro. Digital Healthcare Empowering Europeans R. Cornet et al. (Eds.) © 2015 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI). This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-512-8-729 729