Big Changes in Home Sleep Testing
Changes in technology are coming fast and furious in the field of sleep medicine. The game-changing devices coming to market are focusing on easier ways to capture real-time, detailed, and accurate sleep measurements while sleeping in the home to supplant the use of a sleep lab.
The two biggest obstacles, aside from obvious comfort issues, involve capturing high quality breathing data as well as sleep data. Breathing data devices have still not advanced much beyond AHI and largely ignore the “3rd breathing event” flow limitation (aka RERA) from the upper airway resistance component of sleep apnea.
Sleep data capture has made greater strides. And, two newer devices already on or coming soon to market involve products from two emerging business models developed by DREEM and Cerebra.
The Dreem device compares favorably with in-lab PSG and therefore can provide all the essential sleep architecture. These pictures of the device show great promise for comfort. Unfortunately, they have not pursued any sensing for or analysis of breathing events at this point.
Cerebra was founded on the work of Dr. Magdy Younes and his ORP analysis of sleep depth. While their site does not describe in any detail how they intend to use the device in OSA/UARS cases, they do anticipate a greater capability in measuring severity of impact for mild sleep apnea cases by using the ORP model. This approach should prove a major breakthrough, because the current AHI framework to gauge severity almost always misses the mark in measuring the extent to which patients are impacted.
There are many more videos and webinars at the Cerebra site that provide considerable information on the ORP methodology.