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For most, yes, but there are people who use them while awake... for instance, people who suffer from conditions like ALS or COPD. Even as someone with just vanilla sleep apnea I'll occasionally strap mine on for a while when suffering from a head cold...certainly helps open things up.
> I'll occasionally strap mine on for a while when suffering from a head cold Wait, how does this help? Does this clear up stuffed nose and such?
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Maybe it's my bias, but I assume most of that 10x comes from the overly strict medical device regulations from the FDA.
It doesn't. You can buy CPAP machines from manufacturers that don't work with insurance companies for far less (around 1/4 of the price). The machines are also not locked down, however they do still require a prescription so that part of the cost still exists.
Insurance is nice because they pay for the supplies (some of which are supposed to be replaced pretty frequently). However, I've found that it's pretty easy to stretch the life of any component, as long as you clean it thoroughly each day.
Hi, I worked on this project and have a couple comments to address the issues people are raising. - There are established medical protocols to treat COVID-19 patients with BiPAP machines, including the addition of a viral filter to mitigate aerosolizing the virus. People are using these protocols now and we link to them from the site. - There are two separate firmware hacks presented. The first one modifies ~20 bytes…
> a near identical array of sensors I don't know anything about the devices in question, but from what I know of engineering of medical devices, stating "near identical" makes me listen up. If these devices malfunction, they could hurt people. I expect a device like this to have an extensive array of sensors and a lot of extra hardware for constant self-monitoring. If the two lines of devices don't have exactly ident…
This argument came up in the topic of using ventilators for two patients. It came up again in the topic of using home-built devices.
Of course using untested or under-tested equipment is a last resort. In a situation where there are no alternatives and a patient is dying, we do use unapproved drugs under “compassionate use” with much less testing than is otherwise be necessary. Using hacks like this with only some minimum of clinical testing is similar.
I think all your concerns are addressed in the article. They say it’s a proof of concept that needs more validation, as you would expect.
Hi, I worked on this project and have a couple comments to address the issues people are raising. - There are established medical protocols to treat COVID-19 patients with BiPAP machines, including the addition of a viral filter to mitigate aerosolizing the virus. People are using these protocols now and we link to them from the site. - There are two separate firmware hacks presented. The first one modifies ~20 bytes…
> a near identical array of sensors I don't know anything about the devices in question, but from what I know of engineering of medical devices, stating "near identical" makes me listen up. If these devices malfunction, they could hurt people. I expect a device like this to have an extensive array of sensors and a lot of extra hardware for constant self-monitoring. If the two lines of devices don't have exactly ident…
It's also at least implied that they're not necessarily hoping that this project specifically is used to treat COVID-19 patients; it seems the outcome they're hoping for is that this will publicly pressure manufacturers (presumably beyond just Airsense) to release their own firmware update to convert their CPAP machines to BiPAP.
In other words, far from being a semi-organized group of "basement-dwelling hacker"s, ths project has the appearance of being a very well-thought-out one with a clear roadmap.
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> a near identical array of sensors I don't know anything about the devices in question, but from what I know of engineering of medical devices, stating "near identical" makes me listen up. If these devices malfunction, they could hurt people. I expect a device like this to have an extensive array of sensors and a lot of extra hardware for constant self-monitoring. If the two lines of devices don't have exactly ident…
> If these devices malfunction, they could hurt people. I think that the circumstances under which these are being developed are a special emergency; the alternative to using such a less-safe, makeshift device here would be no ventilator at all, i.e. near-certain death. In this specific circumstance, I think this sort of criticism should be withheld. I don't think anyone's talking about reflashing CPAPs to be life su…
I'm not going to put up with "it helps if it saves lives" as a /blanket/ excuse. It fall apart when it saves some and kills others that could have survived.
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Its worse than that. Before receiving a CPAP machine ~$1,000, most doctor's require a sleep study, which costs many thousands of dollars, and many times wait months to get the appointment. CPAP machines are usually the ultimate solution to reported sleep problems involving repeatedly waking up, and I don't see why they can't be prescribed immediately to see if they solve the problem.
Because (a) there are problems that are not sleep apnea that should not be missed, and (b) the cpap pressure needs to be titrated to your need, it’s not a binary device. Admittedly, (b) is now less of an issue since there are a handful of auto-titrating machines on the market now. They’re less reliable than a sleep study, but they’re better than nothing.
It is true that other things can be the issue. There is a place for sleep studies, and at home sleep studies can detect sleep apnea fast and cheaply, and should be the first option, unless some other ?neurological? symptom is already presenting itself.
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> a near identical array of sensors I don't know anything about the devices in question, but from what I know of engineering of medical devices, stating "near identical" makes me listen up. If these devices malfunction, they could hurt people. I expect a device like this to have an extensive array of sensors and a lot of extra hardware for constant self-monitoring. If the two lines of devices don't have exactly ident…
You're being exceedingly uncharitable in characterizing the team that is working on this the way you do in the last paragraph. The article is littered with disclaimers about the current state of the project. They're very quick to point out that this is only a proof-of-concept, that expert review is ongoing and not complete, and that FDA approval needs to be sought before this can be used to treat COVID-19 patients. I…
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Completely agree. And the worst part is sleep studies are medically unnecessary - an APAP machine (automatic machine) can auto-set the necessary pressure, and no sleep study is needed. Simply sleep with an APAP for a week, review the pressure graph and draw a line at the bottom of the values. Then set the minimum pressure to that number, or slightly less and done. Review every few months. If you ask a Dr. about this…
Hahahahah. Oh man. The vast majority of patients take months or longer to get acclimated to the machine. Most will say they feel /worse/, because the machine gets in the way of their sleep at first. I look forward to hearing more medical pearls from the web design community.
5, 6 hours in a base minimum for me to not feel sluggish and possibly even start the day with a headache.
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Its worse than that. Before receiving a CPAP machine ~$1,000, most doctor's require a sleep study, which costs many thousands of dollars, and many times wait months to get the appointment. CPAP machines are usually the ultimate solution to reported sleep problems involving repeatedly waking up, and I don't see why they can't be prescribed immediately to see if they solve the problem.
Why is a prescription required anyway?
This is used to justify eyeglass prescriptions.
This bullshit really needs to go, especially for eyeglass prescriptions. Making people wait weeks for another eye exam when their glasses break after the first year is honestly bullshit.
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Once the insurance has finished paying for it (eight months in my case), you can disable the radio. Some doctors (mine included) prefer getting your data off the memory card when you visit the office, rather than downloading it from the internet anyway. The radio has to be optional for people whose beds are in places with unreliable or no cellular service (high up in buildings, in basements, fringe areas, etc...)
Yeah the radio is there as an added convenience so you don't have to keep a log and send it in for several months as evidence of usage. This is the fallback for those without radio, and its easy enough to put it in airplane mode. That said, Resmed provides a nice enough interface where you can track your sleep habits. To be fair it seems all they seem to track is how much you sleep each day, not when, where, etc. So…