Generative AI Agents for Bedside Sleep Apnea Detection and Sleep Coaching

Ashan Dhananjaya, Gihan Gamage, Sivaluxman Sivananthavel, Nishan Mills, Daswin De Silva, Milos Manic

Sleep is increasingly acknowledged as a cornerstone of public health, with chronic sleep loss implicated in preventable injury and deaths. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) affects over one billion people worldwide but remains widely under-diagnosed due to dependence on polysomnography (PSG), an overnight, hospital-based intrusive procedure. As an adjunct to the clinical diagnosis of OSA, this paper presents a low-cost, smartphone-based Generative AI agent framework for sleep apnea detection and sleep coaching at the bedside. Powered by an on=device Generative AI model, the four agents of this framework include a classifier, an analyser, a visualiser, and a sleep coach. The key agent activities performed are sleep apnea detection, sleep data management, data analysis, and natural language sleep coaching. The framework was empirically evaluated on a subject-independent hold-out set drawn from a dataset of 500 clinician annotated clips collected from 10 clinically diagnosed OSA patients. Sleep apnea detection achieved an accuracy of 0.89, precision of 0.91, and recall of 0.88, with nightly Apnea–Hypopnea Index (AHI) estimates strongly correlated with PSG-based clinical scores. The framework was further assessed on the performance metrics of computation, latency, memory, and energy usage. The results of these experiments confirm the feasibility of the proposed framework for large-scale, low-cost OSA screening, with pathways for future work in federated learning, noise robustness, and broad clinical validation.