If you want to use technology to identify when a person is snoring, you’d probably need a long series of steps that begins with attaching wires to the person’s scalp, chin and eyelids. But soon the task will be much simpler – just stick a microphone on the bedside table, and use a computer to distinguish what’s a snore sound and what’s not.
Credit for this breakthrough goes to William Duckitt, Seppo Tuomi and Thomas Niesler of the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. They describe their technical tour de force in a paper called Automatic Detection, Segmentation and Assessment of Snoring from Ambient Acoustic Data, published in the journal Physiological Measurement….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.