"Awake button"

Does anyone know of any device that wouldn't take a lot of effort, on which one could just hit a button or similar to mark times when one awakes? I've tried to look at the clock and remember times, but I can't keep them all in my head. I'd like to coordinate those times with SleepyHead so that I can perhaps tell what's going on when I awaken.

Like many here, especially newbies, I'm waking up several to many times a night. That situation really hasn't improved since I got my ASV. There's nothing obvious that I can ascribe it to, although I've reached that particular stage of life that involves a lot of hot flashes and that might be contributing to some of it. Whether hot flashes cause awakening or vice versa I don't know either.

Mad scientist ideas welcome!

Notebook, pencil & little flashlite by your bed?

Problem is, I don't want to become even MORE awake by, e.g., trying to turn on flashlight, pick up pencil and write coherently. Or turn on a smart phone for that matter.

How about a voice activated tape recorder next to your bed?

I saw where some people were hitting their stop/start button and this shows on Sleepyhead.

Interesting thought - even if a recorder only catches "mwah mwah mwah" through my mask, if it records a time, that would still work. Stopping/starting might work, but might wake me up more to do, to reach for and hit the button. Thanks!

I can confirm use of the on/off button does what you want. I use it because I watch netflix on the computer next to my bed many nights and I use my cpap in case I fall asleep while watching it. When I'm done watching and ready to sleep, just a quick two pushes on the start button leave a gap on the graph that is easy to see. So I can tell the difference in the data between when I was watching netflix and when I was actually sleeping. The advantage of doing it this way is that you don't have to be conscious enough to check the time and find the pen and paper, and write it down, and put it away again. Just push the button, wait 5 seconds, and push it again. You'll get good at pushing the button and be able to do it in the dark without even looking or opening your eyes. You'll be able to tell these "markers" from bathroom breaks, if any, because those will last much longer.

disconedt the hose for 10 sec .... it will put a leak spike on the graph

If you have a smartphone on iOS or Android, you can put an app called sleepbot on it. It will show you movement spikes on a graph for whole night. No need to press any buttons. I use it every night.

Just a note about marking awake time by turning the machine off and on every time you wake - I don't know if you use the ramp feature or not, but anyone who restarts their machine several times a night needs to beware of potential overuse of the ramp feature. One could easily end up spending a large portion of their night at an ineffective ramp pressure. Otherwise, It seems a pretty easy way to track your wakings if your machine is easily reachable. Wondering about the smartphone apps - do they report all movements with a generic count or do they distinguish body movement from limb movement etc? Wondering how one would correlate which movements matched awake time?

Sometimes, I will hold my breath for 2 or 3 seconds, take deep inhale, hold my breath again, exhale deeply, then repeat a few times. It leaves a distinctive trace on the airflow waveform.

You could probably also do something like take a deep inhale and exhale, breathe normally for a few seconds, then repeat a time or two. This would make 3 distinct spikes in the airflow waveform that should be fairly easy to see.

Very interesting ideas. The apps look intriguing. They seem to work by using the phone's accelerometer to measure how much one is moving in bed. Since I always move around when I wake up, they would capture that. Just hope I can get them to work with the phone on silent; otherwise the damn thing will "bing" all night . (It actually did that in the sleep lab, much to my chagrin ).

Hitting my on/off button could also work, although you have to hold it down to turn off, which could require more coordination than I'm willing to put out at 3:00 a.m. But I can experiment and see. The obvious advantage is that it would be right there in SleepyHead.

The breathing idea is also interesting. Wouldn't have to reach for anything!

Thanks!

Seems to me that anything you do will wake you up even more making it harder to get back to sleep.

I can see where the data gained might be interesting; but is it useful?
For me, it would not be, as once masked up, I can't stay awake for more than a very few minutes.
Cpap is my drug of choice.

kteague wrote:Just a note about marking awake time by turning the machine off and on every time you wake - I don't know if you use the ramp feature or not, but anyone who restarts their machine several times a night needs to beware of potential overuse of the ramp feature. One could easily end up spending a large portion of their night at an ineffective ramp pressure. Otherwise, It seems a pretty easy way to track your wakings if your machine is easily reachable. Wondering about the smartphone apps - do they report all movements with a generic count or do they distinguish body movement from limb movement etc? Wondering how one would correlate which movements matched awake time?

Right you are - this method only works for us non-ramp folks! This could be a feature that the manufacturers could add to future cpap machines - a "mark" or "note" button. We know how responsive they are to us end users, right?!

I tried the most popular android phone app - SleepBot. It was mildly interesting to see how much we move around while sleeping, but I think we're spoiled by the detail we're used to with sleepyhead. I uninstalled it after a while. It's free, so give it a try if it interests you. It doesn't make any noises while recording and it now works on both apple and android.

At times, I've toyed with the idea of building a recording sleep camera using the $35 Raspberry Pi computer and it's $25 camera module, modified to remove the IR filter: http://www.raspberrypi.org/ir-filter-shenanigans/ How interesting would it be to have a time-synced video that would let you go back and watch a video of yourself sleeping at the time you see something interesting happening in the sleepyhead data? I suppose it might solve some mask leak mysteries or provide insights on what happened on any bad nights.