Sleep science and respiratory engineering as medical subspecialties and research areas grew up side-by-side with biomedical engineering. The formation of EMBS in the 1950's and the discovery of REM sleep in the 1950's led to parallel development and interaction of sleep and biomedical engineering in diagnostics and therapeutics. Over the last 60 years, sleep investigators have relied on biomedical engineering to home-brew the equipment they used to measure physiology during sleep, because sensors and automatic sleep analysis and interpretation systems were too innovative to be available from traditional commercial sources. The Sleep and Respiratory Engineering and related tracks of EMBC, between 1988 and 2010, have presented many papers on this topic including novel techniques of sleep interpretation and new equipment for diagnostics, portable and ambulatory measurement, monitoring, and therapeutics. In this research, we summarize the activity at EMBC related to Sleep and breathing from an historical perspective, showing the number of publications and special sessions devoted to sleep and related topics.