Artificial intelligence in out‐of‐hospital sleep monitoring: Bridging polysomnography and wearable signals
Authors:
Open Access
- 4 July 2026
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Sleep Research
- Vol. 3 (4) , 367-376
Abstract
Polysomnography (PSG), the reference standard for sleep assessment, has limited scalability for large‐scale screening, driving the development of wearable and unobtrusive monitors. However, the physiological signals these devices capture are physiologically correlated with PSG channels but are not completely equivalent. Their reliability and validity for clinical use therefore require careful evaluation. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) provides a technical bridge to close the representation gap between PSG signals and wearable/unobtrusive signals. This review outlines the core role of PSG signals in sleep assessment and sleep disorder diagnosis, including sleep structure analysis, respiratory event detection, and abnormal behavior identification. It then explores the current research progress of wearable and unobtrusive sleep monitoring devices, such as smartwatches, sleep monitoring pads, and radars, for sleep staging and the diagnosis of common sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, and discusses the use of AI in such devices, with a particular focus on building interpretable models to enhance the clinical trustworthiness of out‐of‐hospital sleep monitoring. This article aims to provide valuable insights into the development of low‐burden, easy‐to‐operate, trustworthy assessment tools for out‐of‐hospital sleep monitoring, with the goal of facilitating early detection, personalized management, and long‐term follow‐up of patients with sleep disorders.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (62571557)
This publication has 53 references indexed in Scilit:
- Combined explainable deep learning model to predict pediatric sleep apnea from ECG and SpO2Measurement, 2025
- An explainable deep learning approach for sleep staging in sleep apnea patients across all age subgroups from pulse oximetry signalsEngineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2025
- Altered sleep onset transition in depression: Evidence from EEG activity and EEG functional connectivity analysesClinical Neurophysiology, 2024
- Impact of sleep duration and sleep disturbances on the incidence of dementia and Alzheimer's disease: A 10-year follow-up studyPsychiatry Research, 2024
- An explainable deep-learning architecture for pediatric sleep apnea identification from overnight airflow and oximetry signalsBiomedical Signal Processing and Control, 2023
- An explainable deep-learning model to stage sleep states in children and propose novel EEG-related patterns in sleep apneaComputers in Biology and Medicine, 2023
- Bidirectional relationship between sleep and depressionNeuroscience Research, 2023
- Non-contact determination of sleep/wake state in residential environments by neural network learning of microwave radar and electroencephalogram–electrooculogram measurementsBuilding and Environment, 2023
- Changes in the cortical network during sleep stage transitionsJournal of Neuroscience Research, 2022
- Prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea in children with laryngomalacia and value of polysomnography in treatment decisionsInternational Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, 2020