Objective To develop a method for monitoring unconstrained sleep respiration suitable for daily use at home, so as to realize high precision screening of sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) or other respiratory diseases without affecting normal sleep. Methods A new unconstrained measurement method using sheet-type flexible pressure sensor was proposed. This method could obtain the information of respiratory motions of the chest and abdomen by measuring the pressure fluctuations of the chest and abdomen acting on the mattress. Experiments were conducted on ten healthy subjects to confirm effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing the result of the unconstrained measurement and those of respiratory inductance plethysmography (RIP) using band sensors, respectively. Results Sheet-type flexible pressure sensor could measure the pressure fluctuations of the chest and abdomen acting on the mattress during respiration and obtain respiratory waveform and respiratory rate. The respiratory rate measured with the sheet-type flexible pressure sensor agreed with those obtained by RIP. The gender and the lying position greatly affected whether the phases of the pressure fluctuations of the chest and abdomen measured with the flexible sensor differed from those obtained by RIP. The chest respiratory finite element model was established to analyze the phase difference of respiratory movement. Conclusions Sheet-type flexible pressure sensor is effective to monitor unconstrained sleep respiration, indicating the potential to identify the SAS types. But further researches of motion decoupling are required to identify the phase difference between the chest motion and the abdomen motion, which are coupled with each other.