Sleep Monitor for Sleep Apnea

How can a sleep montior help your sleep apnea?

If you have sleep apnea, you already feel very sleepy during the day.

 To be at our best, we need a certain quantity of sleep every night.

If we don't get enough sleep, we tend to build up sleep debt. This leads to a tendency to feel drowsy during the day and to fall asleep more readily.


Why monitoring your sleep is so important?

Two conditions are very important to get a good sleep:

  • sleep length,
  • sleep quality.

A patient with sleep apnea has both conditions affected. 

If you already receive a treatment for sleep apnea, you'll want to know if you fulfill these conditions. However, it's not so easy to discover how effective is your therapy.

You could judge how good you feel in the morning, or by checking the sleep data from your CPAP machine. However, sometimes you don't feel as rested as you should, so you'd like to know if your sleep is affected and how much is affected.

A sleep monitor can be very helpful to track your sleep. It will answer to these questions:

  • Do I have big, nice and continuous blocks of sleep quality, or is it fragmented into short bits?
  • Do I have enough deep sleep?

People with sleep apnea have one of the worst sleep-quality compared to any other type of patients. This happens because they don't get any rest from their sleep.

When you have sleep apnea, you'll wake up often during the night, without noticing, for taking a big breath of air. Then you'll fall asleep again, just to wake up after a couple of minutes taking another big breath.

When a patient with sleep apnea sleeps, he usually snores very lound and then stops breathing in sleep. That's why he will wake up to take those breaths, also called gasps of air.

These episodes of "stop breathing and gasping" don't allow the patient to enter the sleep stage where he can recover his body and mind. That's why people with sleep apnea have memory problems, dizziness and depression.

So, the quality of sleep is related to the sequence of sleep stages that the brain passes through during the night.

After you go to sleep, the activities of your brain and body settle into a fairly predictable pattern, with two types of sleep:

NREM sleep - is also called quiet sleep, because:

  • your breathing and brain activity are slow and regular.
  • your body is quiet and relaxed.
  • your dreams from NREM sleep are thoughtlike rather than emotional.

NREM sleep has 4 stages of sleep:

    1. Stage 1 lasts about five minutes. Eyes move slowly under the eyelids, muscle activity slows down, and you are easily awakened.
    2. Step 2 is the first stage of true sleep, lasting from 10 to 25 minutes. Eye movement stops, heart rate slows, and body temperature decreases.
    3. In Stage 3 (Deep sleep) you’re difficult to awaken, and if you are awakened, you do not adjust immediately and often feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes.
    4. Stage 4 (intense deep sleep) is the deepest stage of sleep. Brain waves are extremely slow. Blood flow is directed away from the brain and towards the muscles, restoring physical energy.

REM sleep - rapid eye movement

  • is also called active sleep, because there are active changes in your physiology.
  • REM sleep plays a key role in learning and memory.
  • your body temperature rises
  • the blood circulation in your brain increases
  • the large muscles of your body (leg and arm muscles) become paralyzed.
  • your eye muscles become very active and move your eyes back and forth with speed.
  • the most intense and emotional dreams occur during REM sleep.
  • we all need REM sleep. People who are deprived of REM sleep and then allowed to sleep normally, usually experience several nights of REM rebound, in wich they spend a longer time in REM sleep - as if they have been deprived of REM sleep
  • people experiencing REM rebound tend to remember dreaming more and have more vivid and often scarier dreams than normal.
  • patients with sleep apnea are often deprived of the normal amount of REM sleep.


The most important sleep stages for sleep apnea patients

The most important stages of sleep are deep sleep (stages 3 and 4) and REM sleep.

Deep sleep is a time when the body repairs itself and builds up energy for the day ahead. It plays a major role in:

  • maintaining your health, 
  • stimulating growth and development, 
  • repairing muscles and tissues, 
  • and boosting your immune system.

In order to wake up energized and refreshed, getting quality deep sleep is key. And a sleep monitor will show you where your sleep problems are.


Example of sleep monitors

Polysomnogram

The polysomnogram is the best sleep monitor that will analyze your sleep in detail.

However, the polysomnography study is expensive and uncomfortable for some of the patients. There are too many wires and sensors attached to your body. 


Sleeptracker

The SleepTracker is a sleep monitor that can be worn as a watch. This watch "monitors your sleep stages throughout the night and then uses that data to determine the exact moment when you should be awoken helping you feel refreshed and energetic.

SLEEPTRACKER® also comes with the most comprehensive sleep software available allowing you to see how you slept, ways to improve your sleep, and your overall sleep score."

Here is a video explanation of SleepTracker:

How SleepTracker Works?


Sleep As Android

"Sleep As Android" is a software that can transform your android phone or tablet in a sleep monitor. 

This android application has the following purposes:

  • it will help you monitor your sleep, showing you graphics of your sleep habits,
  • it will warn you if you have a sleep deficit, 
  • it will record your sounds during sleep, such as snoring, speaking, gasping for air (from sleep apnea episodes), etc.

Here is a video demonstration about this sleep monitor:

How Sleep As Android Works?


Sleep by MotionX

A similar application with "Sleep as Android" is MotionX, which is dedicated for iPhone users.

The MotionX can:

  • monitor and analyze your sleep cycles,
  • wake you up refreshed and with good energy levels to start the day,
  • offer you a graphical representation of your most important stages of sleep.
  • monitor your heart rate,
  • and many more cool stuff.

Here is the video about MotionX:

How MotionX Works?


The Renew SleepClock 

The Renew SleepClock is the most advanced sleep monitor, in my opinion. Previously, Zeo was the best, but the company doesn't exist anymore.

You'll need an iPod, iPhone or iPad and a special hardware that works with your iOS device.

This video explains clearly everything you need to know about this cool sleep monitor:

How Renew SleepClock Works?


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