APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR DIAGNOSING SLEEP QUALITY

A method of distinguishing sleep period states that a person experiences during a sleep period, the method comprising: using a non-contact microphone to acquire a sleep sound signal representing sounds made by a person during sleep; segmenting the sleep sound signals into epochs; generating a sleep sound feature vector for each epoch; providing a first model that gives a probability that a given sleep period state experienced by the person in a given epoch exhibits a given sleep sound feature vector; providing a second model that gives a probability that a first sleep period state associated with a first epoch transitions to a second sleep period state associated with a subsequent second epoch; and processing the feature vectors using the first and second models to determine a sleep period state of the person from a plurality of possible sleep period states for each of the epochs.