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How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

empirical.health

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Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#141

Post by wkat4242 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #111
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think APAP's are more about comfort and less about effectiveness, although making them more comfortable to use does make them more effective. The algorithm is more about detecting that you aren't asleep and thus don't need the full pressure at the moment and less about altering the target pressure setting on the fly. I could be wrong though, I use is a bipap which works a bit differently than CPAP or APAP.

I have personal experience with the Airsense 10 and it doesn't detect sleep/awake, as far as I can tell. At least not for me; it starts at low pressure, ramps up over a set time to the bottom of the range, and then adjusts as necessary. Low flow or an apnea event will get it to increase the pressure. Sometimes if you are breathing kinda slow lying there awake you can trip it up and feel it start pulsing the pressure…

The pulsing is not to get the air moving but to see what kind of obstruction event it is. It's quite annoying to me and unfortunately it can't be turned off even in the full therapist menu :(

Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#142

Post by wkat4242 »

tootie wrote: post #50
carlmr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>can't really be done just by looking at numbers Depending on the numbers, why not? If it's sensor accuracy a single night might not be enough, but if it detects the condition averaging over a few weeks even unreliable measurements can be made more reliable (given they're just noisy).

Not a doctor, but I was given a diagnosis of severe sleep apnea from an overnight in-lab study. Sought a second opinion who decided it wasn't sleep apnea at all. AHI or T-90 are convenient indicators, but pulmonologists will actually look at the shape of your graph and listen to symptoms. All humans are different and don't always conform to formulas. That being said, your observation that a nightly watch user can col…

That's why a sleep study is not just done with a watch but with ECG, video, breathing band, finger SpO2 clip etc. I was like a cyborg going to the bathroom, so many wires and devices clipped to me :) it's unreasonable to expect a watch to do the same.

Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#143

Post by wkat4242 »

breck wrote: post #104
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because medical science was in its infancy in 1870 and you should only trust medical advice from then if it is obvious, like don't light yourself on fire, or it has been substantiated and backed up with peer reviewed science at some point in the last 150 years. Your argument is just a mix of the appeal to nature fallacy and noble savage trope that people use to justify all sorts of medical treatments with no proven b…

> no proven benefits. The Romans had great health. Proof: here we are thousands of years later alive and using their letters.

I know you're not serious but they were poisoning themselves with lead. Arguments have even been made that ends led to their downfall.

Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#144

Post by wkat4242 »

breck wrote: post #96
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to at least give a brief overview as to why I should trust medical advice from a book written before germ theory was widely accepted? This has all the hallmarks of quackery.

> why I should trust medical advice from a book written before germ theory was widely accepted? Why do you think how to live healthy is a modern invention? Don't you think people had to figure that out ages ago, or else we wouldn't be here?

> Why do you think how to live healthy is a modern invention? Don't you think people had to figure that out ages ago, or else we wouldn't be here?

Not really, no. They had many ideas about health that we know are false now. And we still don't know a lot. Generally people died really young in those days.

But these things don't really matter for the population continuity if people get sick after they get kids, and they used to have them really early in those days (and many). They just didn't usually live until their 90s.

And of course knowing how to live healthy and actually doing it are different things too. It's something we really struggle with as a society and me too.

Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#145

Post by fragmede »

smaudet wrote: post #42
a_vanderbilt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The health industry as a whole is insane. I support the use of regulation and law where it ensures safety and efficacy but in the U.S. it's currently a patent and legal minefield. So much of it comes directly from special interests who want gatekeeping to keep out new/disruptive competition.

On the other side, as a consumer, I don't really want "new/disruptive competition" - I want stability and a legal guarantee my rights aren't being trod all over. Large companies e.g. Google/Apple are just inherently untrustworthy in this regards, smaller overseas ones are no better (little to no regulation). So please, no, stay the ** out of my health, thanks.

Who do you want in your health though? Someone's gonna be in there, so how do they develop trust, or is anybody in that space automatically bad?

Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#146

Post by _rs »

MBCook wrote: post #74
jerlam wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Apple resolve the patent issue that disabled oxygen saturation in the Series 9? Although it's possible that Sleep Apnea detection uses the oxygen saturation sensor but doesn't show its results directly.

No. I was very curious to see if it might be a last minute thing where it came back but the pages for the series 10 clearly don’t list it and if you use the comparison tool it’s highlighted as gone. I hope it’s just still disabled. It would suck for someone to buy a new watch, the fix the dispute in 2 months, and you never get the feature until you buy another new watch. They’re clearly not bending. I don’t know if t…

Non-US watch series 10 specification pages mention it still, so it's there and just disabled. I wonder though if they could legally enable it after the fact on watches imported while the ban was in effect

Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#147

Post by smaudet »

a_vanderbilt wrote: post #52
smaudet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other side, as a consumer, I don't really want "new/disruptive competition" - I want stability and a legal guarantee my rights aren't being trod all over. Large companies e.g. Google/Apple are just inherently untrustworthy in this regards, smaller overseas ones are no better (little to no regulation). So please, no, stay the ** out of my health, thanks.

You can have gains in both today if certain issues are addressed. Innovation doesn't mean a lack of liability or responsibility for negligence. In the U.S. you already have relatively minimal rights in healthcare. Your stability and legal guarantees are already compromised compared to your worldly neighbors. I too distrust tech companies in healthcare due to their differing motivations and organizational cultures. I…

> I want the red tape to go away, but I also want strong regulations and safety nets

I'm not certain those goals can be both met. You can have innovation, but some red tape is necessary.

Of course you could get into arguing that "not all red tape is made equal", but deterring cheap "innovation" from a tech shop trying to make a quick buck is absolutely necessary and useful. The barriers exists for very good reasons, not only as you said they have a different motivation and organizational culture, but they have different qualifications.

Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#148

Post by jjk166 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #130
jjk166 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the cool thing about competition though - you can continue spending your money on the current super expensive option if you like. But others who may not value that stability can choose something else. Personally, I consider big pharma companies the absolute least trustworthy, and I would never choose to purchase anything from them if I would not literally otherwise die. Regulations are not fundamentally bad, b…

When it comes to healthcare, that's a lot more complicated though. Wider competition with less control/accuracy will often mean that fads get more profitable: for instance "gluten free" sells enough that it makes sense for random makers to slap the label on their product even if they don't really care to follow the most rigorous rules. Letting the market decide will result in the minority (those actually affected by…

You can have the regulators choose who can slap a "gluten free" sticker on their product but still give people the freedom to buy products without the sticker.

Competition does not mean getting rid of or even lowering standards, just that if those standards are misaligned with real people's needs we're not stuck with them.

Maintaining a known-flawed status quo is not being cautious. People suffer severely every day from inaccessible medical care. We can always return to the current system if we don't like a change, but until we actually try it we don't even know how much damage the status quo is doing.

Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#149

Post by bluGill »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #136
bluGill wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have a Dr who keeps track of all your medical information. I want my doctor to know each time I take an Aspirin or put on a bandage. Most of the time those are meaningless activities (and I don't tell my doctor), but once in a while there is something more going on and I need to be forced into the ER.

My experience is that doctors don’t even care about the data they have now. There are a lot of charts and info already available digitally to them and they mostly skim things and make basic diagnoses that are unhelpful and obvious. I keep finding myself in the position of pointing at them at things in the data to get better care. I think doctors are mostly a tax, and a barrier. At least primary care. Specialists also…

There is too much data for a human to know it all. We need to give doctors help. When I way I want my doctor to know, that shouldn't be understood as read the update every time it happens. I want tools to analyze all the data and look for patterns - which may or may not exist - and if something "interesting" shows up alert my doctor to take a closer look.

Most of what doctors do should be basic checklists - this is the same thing millions of other people have and should be treated by checklist in best practice. It is the exceptions where you are that 1 in a million case and so there is no checklist that you need doctors to read all the data and think.

Re: How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works

#150

Post by hombre_fatal »

wkat4242 wrote: post #140
jrockway wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just happy that the "service mode" screens are easy to get to. Changing the ramp-up from 10 minutes to 45 minutes made a big difference for me. (I'm honestly surprised someone doesn't make the vendors require a 1000 character passphrase that locks you out of the device after 2 failed attempts.)

Oh i turned the ramp off altogether. I really hate the ramping because the pressure is too low at first

Same. I like instant pressure.
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