One out of four adult Canadians suffers from obstructive sleep, and a team of UWindsor researchers is hoping to learn more.

Jalal Ahmed from engineering and Anthony Bain from human kinetics are leading a multidisciplinary team working to develop a wearable sensor to measure the breathing of sleeping subjects.

“We engineered breathing sensors that can give us complete metrics of different breathing-related signs and patterns,” says Dr. Ahmed. “Breathing is aligned with a lot of our well-being: it regulates our blood pressure and our heart rate and can impact our mental health.”

Body movement, pressure, temp, comfort, and environmental factors are other issues that arise when studying sleep. The next steps for the researchers are to add more sensors, more metrics, and to conduct another sleep study.

Dr. Bain’s lab in HK is set up for sleep studies and Ahmed’s for building sensors.

Their joint study is supported by a Sustainability Grant of $50,000 over two years. Launched by the dean of engineering in 2022, the grants foster collaboration across faculties.

—Naomi Pelkey