Blood oxygen, heart rate, monitoring -- can I pick your brains?

[cathyf]

I had a lab sleep study and was shocked to learn that I no longer am considered to have apnea. I'm having some trouble getting my head around this, after 6 years of sleeping with the machine, and 6 years of knowing that I can always go look at my data and reassure myself that everything was ok and under control while I was asleep.

I'm forming a plan, I think: I will stop using my APAP, but I will invest in some other monitoring tools. I think what I need is to monitor SpO2 and heart rate, right? I already wear my Fitbit Charge 3 at all times -- are there any other Fitbit users out there who have opinions about those tools? I'm pretty confident about the heart rate monitoring (This is my 3rd fitbit, and I've found that the pulse rate has always been spot on when I check it.) The Charge 3 has sleep tools, too, which I've not paid much attention to because they looked kind of dubious and I've always had Sleepyhead/OSCAR. The Fitbit measures something that they call "oxygen variation" and their description sounds like they are measuring SpO2 but they aren't explicitly claiming that.

I've tried to line up what the Fitbit calls my sleep stages, the sleep study hypnogram and the fitbit oxygen variation
sleep stages:

fitbit sleep stages

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hypnogram:

Sleep study hypnogram

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oxygen variations:

fitbit oxygen variations

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I'm eyeballing it and thinking that the fitbit totally missed the arousals, but it did get the sleep stages kind of right. The oxygen variation picked up the cluster of hypopneas, although my SpO2 really didn't drop very far.

Does it seem like I can rely on some interpretation of the fitbit data to alert me if the apnea and desaturations come back? Fitbit has a premium (pay for) option -- do they give more sleep data and more useful data in premium? Or is it just a slicker interface to the same data? Or should I be getting something like a separate pulse-ox to look for desats?

[Miss Emerita]

I'm afraid I can't answer your FitBit questions, but in your place I would buy an oximeter that will display data for the night. Some information that might be useful is here:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/skep ... gist/88677

The (cardiologist) author's bottom line:

"If I had fully researched this topic prior to my impulse purchase on Amazon, I would have purchased the CMS50DL, since it has good bona fides from multiple studies."