Before I start please allow me to declare that I have absolutely no financial interest in any CPAP equipment brand, including and not limited to Phillips or Resmed CPAP machines and their range of other respiratory equipment and accessories, other than my own investment in purchasing the ASV model of both brands for my own use. That said, I am the proud owner of both a Resmd Aircurve 10 ASV and a Philips Respironics Dreamstation Auto SV machine, both of which I like a lot, except that I like my Dreamstation a lot more than I do my Resmed and with very good reasons. I am also fully aware of Phillips's infamous recall of their line of CPAP machines which also covers my unit, however my understanding is that the only identified cause for the degradation of the sound insulating "foam" inside these machines, is the use of Ozone gas which is employed by some CPAP cleaning equipment and since I never use these products, I am not worried about the ""killer foam" inside . Back to why I like my Dreamstration a lot more than I do my Resmed and aside from the obvious superior engineered design of the Dreamstation, its firmware monitors, adjusts to and reports on some critical metrics that my resmed simply ignores (or just sweeps under the rug), while telling me that I am doing great under the therapy that my Resmed provides. One of these critical metrics that my Resmed simply ignores, is "Patient-Initiated Breaths" and naturally "Machine-initiated Breaths", as you can see in a screenshot of my sleep data last night. My Dreamstation provided me with 2319 breaths of fresh air last night within a span of some 6.5 hours, life saving breaths that I would have otherwise not taken by myself as a Central Apnea patient, leading to experiencing a miserable night of constantly waking up throughout and feeling exhausted in the morning and the rest of the day. 2319 machine initiated breaths is of course an average for me as some nights it can go down to a few hundred and sometimes it can go up as much as 4,000 breaths. I simply cannot predict how bad the night is going to be and since I am not on any form of opioids and I do not drink heavily (both known causes of aggravating CSA), it is only a game of chance as to what type of a night I am going to have. This is where my Dreamstation keeping tab on this very important data helps me understand the depth of this problem with at least some degree of accuracy. As you can see in the graph, last night my own initiated breathing went up to almost 100%, on three different occasions, however my median "patient initiated breaths" remained at an alarmingly low 37% median threshold which means that I did not breath on my own for over 60% of the time. Interesting to note that even though my dreamstation reports a much higher AHI as compared to when I use my Resmed ASV, my "TIME SPENT IN PANEA" is almost ZERO with Dreamstation and much higher with Resmed. I believe it is only because my Dreamstation does a much better job of monitoring and reacting to a whole host of parameters that my Resmed simply doesn't bother with. So it is NOT because my Dreamstation isn't capable of lowering my AHI like my Resmed does, but simply because my Resmed isn't calculating the data correctly or even monitoring some critical items while my Dreamstation does a superior job of identifying events and reacting to them. I will of course followup with further posts to explore this comparison adventure between the only 2 commercially available home-use ASV machines, as we go along. Here's a screenshot of last night's DS-1 data:
