Data for this challenge were contributed by the Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH) Computational Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratory (CCNL), and the Clinical Data Animation Laboratory (CDAC). The dataset includes 1,985 subjects which were monitored at an MGH sleep laboratory for the diagnosis of sleep disorders. The data were partitioned into balanced training (n = 994), and test sets (n = 989).

The sleep stages of the subjects were annotated by clinical staff at the MGH according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) manual for the scoring of sleep. More specifically, the following six sleep stages were annotated in 30 second contiguous intervals: wakefulness, stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, rapid eye movement (REM), and undefined.

Certified sleep technologists at the MGH also annotated waveforms for the presence of arousals that interrupted the sleep of the subjects. The annotated arousals were classified as either: spontaneous arousals, respiratory effort related arousals (RERA), bruxisms, hypoventilations, hypopneas, apneas (central, obstructive and mixed), vocalizations, snores, periodic leg movements, Cheyne-Stokes breathing or partial airway obstructions.

The subjects had a variety of physiological signals recorded as they slept through the night including: electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), electromyography (EMG), electrocardiology (EKG), and oxygen saturation (SaO2). Excluding SaO2, all signals were sampled to 200 Hz and were measured in microvolts. For analytic convenience, SaO2 was resampled to 200 Hz, and is measured as a percentage.