Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering MSc students Lixie Hu, Xiaoyang Liu and Hao Lu, supervised by Prof Yi-Kuen Lee, won the Global Youth Innovator Award for their De-snore project at the 2016 iCAN Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas, US on 6-9 January 2016. It is the second consecutive year that School of Engineering students won the award.

The De-snore is a smart senor system devised to detect the severity of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), monitor the sleep quality and make alerts when danger happens due to OSA. OSA is a very common disease, affecting at least 2-4% of the adult population and is increasingly known by the public. It is characterized by a partial or total collapse of the airway during sleep, resulting in sleep-related breathing disorders.

In the students’ project, a low-cost MEMS microphone has been successfully used to collect the audio signal from the patients while sleeping and a computer program was designed to calculate apnea-hypopnea index (AHI). If the AHI is larger than certain threshold, the smart system will automatically send an alert email and SMS. In addition, an Android app was also designed to monitor the patient’s OSA. The project attracted the interest of many people at the show, including senior engineers, venture capitalists and managers in international companies.

Related link:

• De-snore on Youtube
• 2016 iCAN Consumer Electronics Show
• SENG news on 2015 iCAN Consumer Electronics Show