Patient Experience and Technical Success of Community Sleep Studies

There is a study underway to develop a non-contact detector of breathing (SafeScan) as a new method of diagnosing obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). There are a number of different methods already available to achieve this end but one proposed advantage of the new SafeScan device is that it will not affect sleep quality and because there are no measuring devices attached to the patient it is less likely that the signal will be lost in the night due to the normal movements of sleep. However there are no data available that quantify these factors as an issue for the current techniques and devices.

The proving study for SafeScan is a comparison of the ability of the device to measure sleep apnoea compared to full in-hospital polysomnography (PSG) and one outcome will be the proportion of studies that have lost data. However the future use of the SafeScan device will be in the community. The common diagnostics used by patients in their own homes are pulse oximetry as a stand alone measurement and multi-channel respiratory studies that measure oximetry but also record some combination of signals including airflow at the mouth and or nose, chest and abdominal expansion, body position and snoring. We propose a study to examine the patient acceptability of these methods and the proportion of studies that achieve various levels of technical quality ranging from a full night with all data available to a completely failed study and categories in between. In addition there will be an analysis of the results to explore whether there are features of the patients such as age and obesity that make technical success or failure of the studies more likely.