Comparative Analysis of the Feasibility Between Single‐Channel Frontal Pole Flexible Electrode Sleep Patches and Polysomnography in Stroke Survivors

Polysomnography (PSG), the gold standard for sleep monitoring, remains limited by its high cost and technical complexities in operation and data analysis. The flexible electrode sleep patch (FESP) is a novel wearable frontal single-channel EEG device for rapid sleep monitoring via FP1 and FP2 sites. Although preliminary studies support its reliability in healthy individuals, its feasibility for stroke patients remains unexplored. We compared the two devices in terms of consistency, correlation, specificity, and sensitivity regarding sleep parameters, sleep structures and EEG characteristic waves in stroke survivors. Initially, a stroke-specific sleep staging algorithm was trained using recorded sleep data from 26 healthy individuals and 26 stroke patients. Subsequently, 45 stroke patients were monitored with single night-time synchronised PSG and FESP for approximately 6-8 h. Our results indicated that FESP and PSG exhibit significant agreement in sleep metrics among stroke survivors. For sleep stages, the Cohen Kappa values ranged from 0.68 to 0.83. For sleep-related metrics, Pearson correlation coefficients (PCC) ranged from 0.720 to 0.890, and intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) ranged from 0.661 to 0.889. The specificity of Deep stages was 95.76% with high accuracy of 93.79%. FESP offers a clinically viable alternative for initial sleep assessment, with significant potential to enhance the diagnosis and management of stroke-related sleep disorders.