Interpreting sleep data

I'm interested in how you others folks' out there see your sleep data and interpret it. I use Sleepyhead for my analysis.

One thing I think is misleading in some of the summary scoring the manufacturers apps provide (e.g. the handful of stats provided by Resmed on the cpap unit display and/or the MyAir phone app) is that they seem to be focused on compliance (hours of use) rather than true sleep quality. Their scoring methodology assigns the preponderance of the weighting to the time the machine was used.

If I look at my data from a poorer sleep night where I had say a 5 or 6 total AHI, I often find that that result is largely a function of a rapid service of CAs over a relatively brief period, say 20m, and that the rest of the night I slept relatively uninterrupted with a much lower AHI (it's easy to do the math for specific time periods).

On the other hand a lower score may show in the data that while I had fewer interruptions they were dealt out across the night and that I had no lengthy periods of no interruptions.

A minor point perhaps but your "score" can be artificially inflated simply by making sure you meet their minimum hours of use stat.

Everyone is different, and affected differently by their sleep issues, so I simply encourage diving into the data to better understand how your therapy is really proceeding

Thoughts welcomed.

I have never bothered to sign up for MyAir because I think the reporting is not useful for the reasons you give. All it gets is the basic compliance data that is sent wirelessly to the MyAir website. Instead I use SleepyHead to view the detailed data. You can get a little more detailed report from the machine itself if you go into the Clinical Menu and set the Essentials to Plus. But, SleepyHead is still much better.

It takes me 15 - 30 minutes to fall asleep (before CPAP it took maybe 10), and I sleep at night and take a nap each day. So I subtract out that time from the MyAir numbers and then redo the division in my head. As long as the result is under 5 (it averages about 3), I really don't care about the rest. The MyAir numbers are pretty crude, but my assumption is they want to keep things as simple as possible to get and keep as many people using the machine as they can, without loading them down with information.

Hi Francesco,

I don't use Myair and rarely use Sleepyhead because I think all the details and data are largely irrelevant.

I also suspect that becoming too absorbed in the technicalities can be problematic.

I have always had the view that CPAP is only a crutch and the real solutions lie elsewhere.

The numbers generated by the machine certainly don't reflect quality of life for me.

I've never felt that the CPAP hours were representative of how much real sleep I was getting so recently I began using a Fitbit and, when I can get it to sync, it tells an entirely different story. A story that truly reflects how I feel and what I remember.

When I get an opportunity I will gather a bunch of data from the Fitbit and CPAP and compare them.

It's probably a waste of time but it might give me a beneficial hint or two.

It might make some basic lifestyle changes so obvious that even I can't ignore them anymore.