Wearable-Based Integrated System for In-Home Monitoring and Analysis of Nocturnal Enuresis

Abstract

Nocturnal enuresis (NE) is involuntary bedwetting during sleep, typically appearing in young children. Despite the potential benefits of the long-term home monitoring of NE patients for research and treatment enhancement, this area remains underexplored. To address this, we propose NEcare, an in-home monitoring system that utilizes wearable devices and machine learning techniques. NEcare collects sensor data from an electrocardiogram, body impedance (BI), a three-axis accelerometer, and a three-axis gyroscope to examine bladder volume (BV), heart rate (HR), and periodic limb movements in sleep (PLMS). Additionally, it analyzes the collected NE patient data and supports NE moment estimation using heuristic rules and deep learning techniques. To demonstrate the feasibility of in-home monitoring for NE patients using our wearable system, we used our datasets from 30 in-hospital patients and 4 in-home patients. The results show that NEcare captures expected trends associated with NE occurrences, including BV increase, HR increase, and PLMS appearance. In addition, we studied the machine learning-based NE moment estimation, which could help relieve the burdens of NE patients and their families. Finally, we address the limitations and outline future research directions for the development of wearable systems for NE patients

Keywords

• nocturnal enuresis
• in-home monitoring
• wearable sensor
• feature engineering
• convolutional–LSTM–attention model