A portable digital recording system and the Nightingale sleep analyser have been applied to record polygraphical sleep signals in patients suffering from chronic pain. Using ambulatory recording the patient can sleep at home making the sleep more natural and reducing the costs. The recording system gives digital recordings of very good quality. It is shown that the Nightingale sleep analyser performs automatic sleep analysis with a quality comparable to visual interrater performance on disordered sleep. It furthermore provides means for extraction of spectral information useful for the description of the sleep-wakefulness processes and for diagnosing the sleep disorders. Using AR-model-based power spectral analysis, it is also shown that the power content in the alpha band relative to the delta power is significantly higher in patients suffering from non-specific chronic pain as compared to normal persons.
Keywords
Ambulatory Recordings - Chronic Pain Disorders - Automatic Interpretation - Nightingale Sleep Analyser - Power Spectral Analysis - Auto-regressive Modelling
