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arXiv · 2509.07896

Feasibility of In-Ear Single-Channel ExG for Wearable Sleep Monitoring in Real-World Settings

Philipp Lepold·Jonas Leichtle·Tobias Röddiger·Michael Beigl
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Abstract

Automatic sleep staging typically relies on gold-standard EEG setups, which are accurate but obtrusive and impractical for everyday use outside sleep laboratories. This limits applicability in real-world settings, such as home environments, where continuous, long-term monitoring is needed. Detecting sleep onset is particularly relevant, enabling consumer applications (e.g. automatically pausing media playback when the user falls asleep). Recent research has shown correlations between in-ear EEG and full-scalp EEG for various phenomena, suggesting wearable, in-ear devices could allow unobtrusive sleep monitoring. We investigated the feasibility of using single-channel in-ear electrophysiological (ExG) signals for automatic sleep staging in a wearable device by conducting a sleep study with 11 participants (mean age: 24), using a custom earpiece with a dry eartip electrode (D\"atwyler SoftPulse) as a measurement electrode in one ear and a reference in the other. Ground truth sleep stages were obtained from an Apple Watch Ultra, validated for sleep staging. Our system achieved 90.5% accuracy for binary sleep detection (Awake vs. Asleep) and 65.1% accuracy for four-class staging (Awake, REM, Core, Deep) using leave-one-subject-out validation. These findings demonstrate the potential of in-ear electrodes as a low-effort, comfortable approach to sleep monitoring, with applications such as stopping podcasts when users fall asleep.

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Philipp Lepold, Jonas Leichtle, Tobias Röddiger, Michael Beigl. 2025-09-09. Feasibility of In-Ear Single-Channel ExG for Wearable Sleep Monitoring in Real-World Settings. https://doi.org/10.1145/3714394.3757253

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