Home Sleep Apnea Testing  – No More Guess Work! 

What is home sleep apnea testing?

Sleep apnea can be difficult to identify in almost all cases and especially when people live alone. Most of the symptoms many be caused by variety of different health challenges.

You may suspect that you have sleep apnea when you wakeup each day tired after having a full night of sleep. Well, that could be for many reasons, if work too much or live a sedentary life or eat too much the night before you may have something that appears to be explainable. What if this is going on for a long period of time, some may think that the tiredness is natural and it will sort itself out. Perhaps you change your mattress and get an ergonomic pillow, yet after sometime of trying this you realize you are still suffering day in and day out.

This type of trial-and-error diagnosis by the individual not only costs time and money it also puts you and others at risk due to tiredness driving or in the workplace; and you are potentially liable. Assuming that someone isn’t injured, your mood will be of constant irritancy irrespective of your work and family life suffering.

Just to refresh your memory, the main and ambiguous signs seen is sleep apnea are;

  • Loud snoring.
  • Gasping during sleep.
  • A headache in the morning.
  • A dry mouth.
  • Insomnia.
  • Daytime sleepiness.
  • Challenges paying attention and irritability.

Not to mention that risk categories now apply to a large cross section of the population; smokers, drinks, the obese, and women post menopause.

Furthermore, how are you supposed to know if you have all the symptoms if you are asleep or even half-asleep. It is manly the partners of the person affected that tell them about some of these signs. What if you live alone? Is your dog or cat going to tell you?

Traditionally you may spend a lot of time going back and forth to your health care processional to get an apt diagnosis. Referrals could occur while at the diagnosis stage, while there is potential that some may not find anything wrong due to the ambiguity of symptoms.

There is light at the end of the tunnel now, you can now get wrist-based sleep apnea testing (HSAT) devices that are cost effective, have auto report generation and reduce ambiguity in diagnoses, so that you can get to solution stage of the process.

How Do HSATs Work?

These clever yet cost effective devices measure known sleep apnea parameters through measuring if a person is sleeping or awake, detecting also the different types of sleep. Is the person in random eye movement (REM) sleep, a deep or a light sleep. By having the ability to assess these the user knows how well the are sleeping.

In addition to true sleep the user is achieving each night the device also checks body position. For example a person laying on their front may be waking up due to suffocating themselves.  Sensors also measure snoring.

These HSAT devices also records the Oxygen Desaturation Index (ODI) of a person which is vital to see if the user is getting enough oxygen in the blood. Apnea/Hypopnea Index (AHI) and Respitory Disturbance Index (RDI) are calculated and also recorded.

As you can tell these devices cover extensively a lot of sleep apnea attributes and how these impact the user.

As such devices need to be flexible to the patients needs the software typically is either installed on a local PC or server, or accessible from the cloud.

With such products allowing users to auto-generate reports after minutes of installing the software or directly allowing the user to send data to the physician for analysis, diagnosis is by far much similar than the guesswork mentioned earlier.