The Project

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is a mysterious condition that causes infants to pass away in their sleep by unknown causes. There has been limited research done in the area of SIDS and even less discoveries. Our client thinks that one potential cause of this condition is an abnormality in the sleep states of an infant. There is a current lack of solid data on infant sleep states that is easily available for researching.

In this project, our group is designing and implementing a system that will gather data from an infant using non-intrusive methods. This data is then be processed to determine the infants sleep states. The processed data will be accessible through various graphs on a private website. After that is finished, we will consider implementing an alarm system to alert parents of any potential irregularities. Alternatively, we would look into adding additional non-invasive devices to monitor infants, or add other modules we have not considered, depending on our client's needs.

We are improving upon a system built by previous senior design teams with the intention to record, process, and host data on infant sleep states. The previous system focused on using webcams and MIT Eulerian Video Magnification (EVM) to find infant pulse and movement. The EVM has specific problems with darker skin tones and room lighting. Our new goal is to use alternative monitoring devices to obtain data from the infants including heart rate monitors.

The devices will pass their data to servers for storage and hosting. The server will allow researchers the ability to request infant sleep data that has been previously collected.

The project will require an algorithm to determine sleep state of the infant. This algorithm will map high (REM) and low (SWS) heart rate of infants to then determine what state of sleep the infant is in.

The website will be a user interface for requesting and visualizing infant sleep data. The main goal will be to provide: authentication through a username password, access to graphs of infant data, and access to video monitoring of infants.