Quantum machine learning for detection of sleep deprivation from EEG signals

Approximately 50% of the population in India is estimated to experience sleep-related disorders. Sleep deprivation is a prevalent condition that adversely impacts cognitive performance, neural functioning, and overall health. Electroencephalography (EEG) offers an objective means of capturing neural alterations associated with sleep loss, making it well-suited for automated detection frameworks. In this study, we explore the application of a Quantum Support Vector Machine and Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks to classify sleep-deprived and well-rested states using resting-state EEG signals. A comprehensive feature extraction pipeline is employed, incorporating spectral band power, band ratios, Hjorth parameters, and functional connectivity measures. These features are subsequently encoded into quantum states to construct a quantum kernel, which is then utilized for classification. Model performance is evaluated under both epoch-level and subject-level data partitioning schemes. The Hybrid Quantum Neural Network (HQNN) achieves the highest performance across both evaluation settings, attaining an accuracy of 96.88% at the epoch level and 81.25% at the subject level. The Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) model achieves accuracies of 93.75% and 75.00% for epoch-level and subject-level evaluations, respectively. At subject-level and epoch-level evaluation, HQNN outperforms previously reported results (95.72% and 68.23%). Overall, these findings highlight the potential of quantum machine learning as a competitive approach for EEG-based sleep deprivation detection, with promising implications for real-world biomedical applications.