Video-based actigraphy for monitoring wake and sleep in healthy infants: A laboratory study

Prolonged monitoring of infant sleep is paramount for parents and healthcare professionals for interpreting and evaluating infants’ sleep quality. Wake-sleep patterns are often studied to assess this. Video cameras have received a lot of attention in infant sleep monitoring because they are unobtrusive and easy to use at home. In this paper, we propose a method using motion data detected from infrared video frames (video-based actigraphy) to identify wake and sleep states. The motion, mostly caused by infant body movement, is known to be substantially associated with infant wake and sleep states. Two features were calculated from the video-based actigraphy, and a Bayesian-based linear discriminant classification model was employed to classify the two states. Leave-one-subject-out cross validation was performed to validate our proposed wake and sleep classification model. From a total of 11.6 h of infrared video recordings of 10 healthy term infants in a laboratory pilot study, we achieved a reliable classification performance with a Cohen’s kappa coefficient of 0.733 ± 0.204 (mean ± standard deviation) and an overall accuracy of 92.0% ± 4.6%.