A new app that uses a smartphone to wirelessly test for sleep apnea may be able to detect whether your snoring is just annoying or a potentially life-threatening problem.
The gold standard for diagnosing sleep apnea—a disease which affects roughly 1 in 13 Americans—requires an overnight hospital stay and may cost thousands of dollars. The patient sleeps in a strange bed, gets hooked up to a tangle of wires, and undergoes an intensive polysomnography test to count how many times a night he or she struggles to breathe.
By contrast, ApneaApp works in a patient’s own bedroom and uses inaudible sound waves emanating from the phone’s speakers to track breathing patterns without needing special equipment or sensors attached to the body.
Right now phones have sensing capabilities that we don't fully appreciate.
