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I suffer from periodic limb movement disorder. It’s actually the second most common sleep disorder after sleep apnea.

It’s restless legs, but it happens in deep sleep, when you’re unaware it’s happening.

Sleep apnea has tons of tech built up to help with the problem. Smart connected CPAPs that monitor your sleeping for you, for example.

But for periodic limb movements in deep sleep the specific need of tracking limb movements is not well covered. My sleep doctor suggested putting a fit bit on my ankle. This sort of works, but not well.

With such a large potential market, and totally plausible movement sensing products, I’m surprised more companies haven’t gotten specifically into limb movement monitoring during sleep.



What’s the point of monitoring it? How does it help preventing it? Is it even a problem causing troubles?


Hi @softwaredoug, I would also like to know how detection helps. FYI I assume a Convolutional Neural Network could easily do it, the tech' is very accessible, would love to further discuss this.


It helps a few ways

- Confirming that's why I'm groggy in the AM, and not some other reason

- which limbs are moving, which can help for targeted treatment (stretching, magnesium cream, etc)


If you are not sleeping with a blanket, I'm suggesting either video recording yourself (e.g. with a cellphone) and after that running a pose estimation model over the video, or running the model live (this one seems promising: https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/examples/pose_estimation/ove... ), if you are sleeping with a blanket, the model may need training. Then once you have the pose estimations, it should be easier to analyze. Please contact me if you want us to try together.




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