Comment by NelsonMinar 4 days ago
I like the concept but I'm curious how it works. It sounds like it's based on detecting the movements of the wearer? Does that work?
It's a shame Apple is having patent issues with their SpO2 sensor. The O2Ring was a huge help in me understanding my sleep apnea early on, in combination with a formal sleep study. Sleep apnea is a very common and harmful problem, any sort of way of helping detect it will improve a lot of lives.
Their most recent press announcement around Android Wear seemed to imply that they don't license the tech outside of selling their own biosensors.
https://investor.masimo.com/news/news-details/2024/Masimo-Pa...
It’s only turned off in the US right? Would they use the data in the rest of the world since SpO2 data is available there?
The SpO2 data isn't useful for detecting sleep apnea because the sampling frequency on a smartwatch is way too coarse to pick up on it.
oh that's too bad. The O2Ring samples every 2 or 4 seconds but a lot of cheaper devices take an average reading once a minute or so which definitely obscures sleep apnea. (normal adults take a breath every 3-5 seconds when sleeping. with obstructive sleep apnea that can be more like once a minute.)
I don't think the apple watch is as accurate as they claim, and it seems to need many nights of data to make a sleep apnea decision, so in that respect it is vastly inferior to polysomnography. But hey, if it helps more people seek a proper diagnosis, then I'm all for it. Sleep apnea sucks. It seriously ruins lives.
Also: SpO2 is less useful here than you might think. Most at-home sensors are pretty unreliable, and it's possible to have sleep disordered breathing without having significant desaturation.
Well if you already have an Apple Watch and don’t want to spend the night plus potential sleep study cost (can be above $1000 for a lot of people), then this may help someone. Especially if they don’t even know.
I have sleep apnea and used Lofta’s service for $187 and paid for the machine out of pocket. So there is definitely a need for this type of testing.
> I don't think the apple watch is as accurate as they claim
What is the claim that they’re making that you take issue with? You should probably let the FDA know.
For real; this stupid patent thing is just one greedy company trying to get royalties from another while an entire built solution that could tangibly help regular people hone down on medical issues is completely disabled. I’m not usually the type to trash talk capitalism but this is stupid. I hope the company chasing down Apple for this goes bankrupt. It’s not like they’ve offered something I want to go buy that does the same thing.
They're tracking movements. Apple has a doc on how it works here[0]
>Apple Watch tracks movement with triaxial accelerometer signals, which capture coarse motion of the body as well as fine movements including motion associated with breathing. Apple developed an algorithm that uses the accelerometer time series data to classify Breathing Disturbances that occur during sleep tracking, which are temporary interruptions in the breathing pattern.
> A total of 1499 participants were enrolled, with 1448 completing the study. The sensitivity was 66.3% (95% CI: 62.2% to 70.3%), and the specificity was 98.5% (95% CI: 98.0% to 99.0%), demonstrating that the feature meets the design objectives to confidently identify sleep apnea while minimizing false positives.
>It’s important to note that the specificity was 100% (95% CI: 99.7 to 100%) for the normal category, indicating that all participants with a “positive” algorithm result had at least mild sleep apnea. Also, sensitivity was higher in the severe category at 89.1% (95% CI: 83.7% to 93.2%), indicating that the large majority of severe cases were identified.
0:https://www.apple.com/health/pdf/sleep-apnea/Sleep_Apnea_Not...
Are the patent issues just refusing to pay now or are they more complicated than that?