Hypnogram of normal sleep indicating the sleep stages.

An adult should be sleeping 7-8 hours in a day to maintain the full physical and intellectual capacity. Due to various sleep disorders this is not always possible. After a complaint about sleep problems to one's general practitioner (GP) the GP sometimes sends the patient to a sleep clinic. Depending on the case the sleep clinic may decide to perform either a full polysomnography or a lighter version of sleep registration to the patient, either in the clinic or in the patient's home. These sleep recordings produce many hours of signals which are time consuming to analyze visually. It is here that the sleep signal analysis comes to play trying to automate the analysis to assist the medical personnel. SSSAG has participated in several national and international sleep signal analysis projects. The main focus has been in the analysis of the brain activity (EEG) and the eye movement activity (using electro-oculography, EOG) of the subjects not ignoring the other polysomnographic signals. The studies have resulted in improved methods of establishing the sleep profile, the detection of eye movements, various EEG phenomena, arousals etc. Links Polysomnography, Wikipedia Michael Thorpy's sleep portal Websciences International sleep portal European Sleep Research Society