Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 5, numbers 3 and 4, 2013 // View article

A new device for Sleep Apnea Treatament telemonitoring: a bench study

Authors:
Valentina Isetta
Josep M. Montserrat
Geraldine Thiebaut
Claude Weber
Daniel Navajas
Ramon Farré

Keywords: telemedicine; eHealth; home monitoring; sleep apnea; CPAP

Abstract:
Patient’s compliance is crucial for the effectiveness of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Unfortunately, up to 50% of patients withdraw CPAP because of treatment side effects. Monitoring a patient’s CPAP compliance at home would be useful to early detect underuse and to properly address problems. Air Liquide developed NOWAPI, a novel telemedicine system, which provides a remote monitoring of the CPAP treatment and is designed to be compatible with all CPAP devices under clinical use. The aim of this study was to validate this novel telemonitoring system in a bench test. NOWAPI detects important CPAP treatment efficiency parameters, such as the usage time and residual events, and sends them to a secure server, from which can be downloaded for analysis by the healthcare staff. In this study, NOWAPI was tested when using CPAP devices applied to a model simulating OSA patients. In a first test phase, to assess the influence of NOWAPI sensor unit geometry to the CPAP treatment, the responses of 2 different CPAP machines to a series of 10 disturbed breathing patterns with NOWAPI connected or not to the setting was compared. Then, the telemedicine system performance was tested in 30 simulated patients’ sleep periods of CPAP treatment, lasting 4 hours each. They consisted of disturbed breathing patterns built from selected events of real OSA patients’ polysomnographic recordings. The recorded data of each test were telemetrically sent to a server by the NOWAPI GPRS module, then downloaded and analyzed. The simulated patients were treated with 3 different currently available CPAP devices. NOWAPI sensor unit connection to the setting did not influence the CPAP treatment in the two CPAP devices analyzed. The difference between the treatment duration estimated by the device and actual values was never higher than 3 minutes over the 4-hour test. The absolute difference between the apnea-hypopnea index estimated by NOWAPI and the actual values, 0.9±1.6 events/hour (mean±SD), was not significantly different from the absolute difference between the AHI estimated by the CPAP machines and the actual values, 0.9±1.0 events/hour (p=0.171). NOWAPI showed an excellent performance in estimating the duration of the CPAP treatment and in detecting residual respiratory events in simulated OSAS patients. NOWAPI system could be a valuable tool for telemonitoring the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea.

Pages: 250 to 259

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2013. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2013

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660