CAVEAT: If you have symptoms such as snoring, excessive day-time sleepiness, need for rapid breathing after waking up etc., don’t rely on putting a phone on your belly; go to a doctor.
Smartphone for monitoring breathing during naps… With apps such as SensorLog for iPhone or phyphox for Android you can log the pitch angle (angle between the long axis and horizontal) of your smartphone. Before a nap, turn on logging and place one end of the phone on your hip bone, the other on your belly. Afterwards you can examine your breathing pattern by looking at the pitch-over-time curve.
I’ve used this as a quick-and-dirty test for sleep apnea without having to buy an expensive respiration belt or going through the hassle of a sleep nap. Note that my worry about sleep apnea is mostly hypochondriac and founded on sometimes violent sleep phenomena. See the caveat above.
To check for sleep apnea, you can borrow from doctor a sensor for one night. You attach the sensor to your finger, and it measures… something… during the night. The next morning the doctor uploads the data to computer and tells you how serious it is; you will see the graph of oxygen level in your blood during the night.
If it turns out you do have sleep apnea, one interesting solution is Velumount. If the reason for apnea is that the… thing in your throat… is blocking the airways when you sleep, the “so simple it shocks you” solution is to stick a wire into your throat each night to keep the airways open. It’s a lot of “fun” when you learn to do it without vomiting, heh, but then it works like magic; no surgery or electric device needed.
That’s great information that one doesn’t have to go to a sleep lab anymore! The sensor test sounds like something I’d want to do even with my low expectation of having sleep apnea.
The Velumount is a nice device – I think one of my friends has one. Snoring, however, isn’t my problem. My throat is still young and springy. I was thinking more of central sleep apnea, which has a much lower base rate.
CAVEAT: If you have symptoms such as snoring, excessive day-time sleepiness, need for rapid breathing after waking up etc., don’t rely on putting a phone on your belly; go to a doctor.
Smartphone for monitoring breathing during naps… With apps such as SensorLog for iPhone or phyphox for Android you can log the pitch angle (angle between the long axis and horizontal) of your smartphone. Before a nap, turn on logging and place one end of the phone on your hip bone, the other on your belly. Afterwards you can examine your breathing pattern by looking at the pitch-over-time curve.
I’ve used this as a quick-and-dirty test for sleep apnea without having to buy an expensive respiration belt or going through the hassle of a sleep nap. Note that my worry about sleep apnea is mostly hypochondriac and founded on sometimes violent sleep phenomena. See the caveat above.
To check for sleep apnea, you can borrow from doctor a sensor for one night. You attach the sensor to your finger, and it measures… something… during the night. The next morning the doctor uploads the data to computer and tells you how serious it is; you will see the graph of oxygen level in your blood during the night.
If it turns out you do have sleep apnea, one interesting solution is Velumount. If the reason for apnea is that the… thing in your throat… is blocking the airways when you sleep, the “so simple it shocks you” solution is to stick a wire into your throat each night to keep the airways open. It’s a lot of “fun” when you learn to do it without vomiting, heh, but then it works like magic; no surgery or electric device needed.
That’s great information that one doesn’t have to go to a sleep lab anymore! The sensor test sounds like something I’d want to do even with my low expectation of having sleep apnea.
The Velumount is a nice device – I think one of my friends has one. Snoring, however, isn’t my problem. My throat is still young and springy. I was thinking more of central sleep apnea, which has a much lower base rate.