Wearables and Sleep Apnea
Many people use fitness trackers like the Apple Watch and Fitbit to improve their health by monitoring things like sleep. The latest research from Cardiogram and UCSF shows that smartwatches can also be used to detect serious conditions like sleep apnea and hypertension.
Untreated sleep apnea can lead to high blood pressure, heart problems and stroke. It is a common condition that can be detected at home using devices that measure snoring or breathing pauses.
Can Wearables Detect Sleep Apnea?
With limited medical resources and a growing physician shortage, it’s important to find new ways of screening for sleep-related disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Current at-home diagnostic techniques like polysomnography and cardiorespiratory monitoring are invasive and costly.
Luckily, there are some wearable devices that can detect OSA by using a combination of accelerometer and heart-rate data. These devices include smartwatches and fitness trackers with green-light reflective photoplethysmography and multi-axial acceleration sensors.
These devices can monitor the user’s movements and heart-rate to measure breathing patterns, sleep duration, snoring, and apneic episodes. However, the software algorithms that determine what is considered sleep and what is wake are a bit of a black box. Because of this, the results of different devices from a single brand or even across multiple models may vary.
Apple Watch
The Apple Watch has long been the gold standard in wearable technology. The latest versions have features that let you track your heart health, monitor body temperature and sleep cycle, and even detect falls.
A new app called Cardiogram has been able to detect atrial fibrillation, hypertension and sleep apnea using an advanced AI on the device. The app organizes heart rate and other data from the Apple Watch’s built-in sensor to report on cardiovascular health with 82 percent accuracy.
Unlike the Apple Watch, other devices such as Fitbit don’t include a heart rate sensor that is FDA approved to diagnose sleep apnea. However, third party apps such as NapBot can help you use your smartwatch to monitor your sleep and identify patterns that may indicate a possible case of sleep apnea. However, a doctor must still be consulted to make a diagnosis.
Fitbit
Many individuals who experience obstructive sleep apnea are not aware of their condition until they are told by a friend or family member that they snore heavily or gasp for air during their sleep. Using a wearable device to track sleep patterns has the potential to help identify these issues so that individuals can be referred to a physician for evaluation and treatment of this serious health condition.
However, this is not easy to accomplish on a consumer level. In order to detect obstructive sleep apnea, a device must directly measure a number of different things, such as heart rate and blood oxygen levels, which are more difficult to achieve with a wrist-mounted sensor. It also requires additional software to evaluate the data and interpret it in a meaningful way. In addition, there are some technical issues that must be solved in order to make consumer-oriented devices suitable for use in a clinical setting. This includes correcting for bias and optimizing clinically-oriented features.
Garmin
Garmin recently teamed up with the University of Kansas Medical Center to foster innovation and better understand how wearables can be used in healthcare. Their collaboration aims to identify sleep apnea by monitoring sleep behavior and analyzing sensor data.
This is an important step in the right direction because diagnosing sleep apnea requires costly and time-consuming polysomnography tests. Garmin’s device uses a smartphone that is connected to an oxygen saturation sensor, which allows it to measure blood oxygen levels and pulse rate. The sensor is integrated with a wristwatch, so it’s easy to keep an eye on your heart health.
Most new wearables can track your REM and light sleep stages, but they only have a medium level of accuracy when it comes to detecting pauses in breathing or shallow breaths. That’s why it’s important to pair your wearable with a health app like Cardiogram, which is able to detect hypertension and sleep apnea by looking at your accelerometer, ECG, and heart rate data using an advanced AI called DeepHeart.
OnePhenix the only IPAAS software that connects your wearable data to your healthcare professionals. www.Onephenix.com.au