SmartSleep Lab - University of Eastern Finland

The Sleep Technology and Analytics Research group (STAR) was established in 2017 and is run by Professor Timo Leppänen. The SmartSleep lab was established in 2022 and is run by Academy Research Fellow Samu Kainulainen. Both the research group and the lab are located at the Department of Technical Physics, University of Eastern Finland and affiliated with the Clinical Research Center, Kuopio University Hospital and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Queensland. In our research group, national and international collaboration plays a key role. The research group offers an inspiring, active, and youthful working environment. The group conducts globally known and recognized research related to the development of groundbreaking computational tools for the analysis of sleep recordings and physiological data.

Our research group has developed novel computational solutions for a more accurate diagnosis of sleep apnea, investigating the relationship between the severity of individual respiratory events and the severity of sleep apnea, and developing novel wearable technologies for self-applicable monitoring of sleep disturbances. We have developed machine and deep learning based approaches for the estimation of sleep apnea severity, assessment of sleep apnea-related daytime sleepiness, and automatic detection of sleep stages. In addition, the investigations related to the associations between cardiometabolic and neurocognitive functioning and sleep disorders are one of the main fields of research in our group. We have also commercialized an easy-to-use forehead electrode set (Bittium BrainStatus™, Bittium Corp., Oulu, Finland) for recording of EEG.