Remote, real-time mask alert

My son has recently begun CPAP therapy with a Respironics System 1.

He is a heavy, and active, sleeper. He will often throw his mask off during the first few hours of the night. The CPAP machine has a mask alert, but it is not loud enough to wake him up. We need a way to recognize that the mask has become dislodged, and wake him up remotely via loud buzzer, Skype, or ???

Is there any way to access the alert signal from the machine in real time, so that the intervention can be made?

Thanks.

eseel wrote: active, sleeper.

Not sure what that means. Maybe you mean he is moving and waking often? If so, he may have developed this practice due to having apneas that awaken him and make him uncomfortable.

eseel wrote:He will often throw his mask off during the first few hours of the night.

How old is he?

Many adult newbies take off the mask and are unaware of it. This practice usually goes away after they get acclimated to sleeping with CPAP.

Most importantly, does he (or you) know how to evaluate his data to make sure the therapy is working well? This means achieving a low AHI and low mask leak. If the therapy is not working well, the user is more likely to take off the mask "in his sleep".

Forum members can help you learn how to evaluate the therapy and make any improvements that may be needed.

My dad had a hearing loss problem and had difficulty in hearing the door bell from his bedroom. He solved it by installing a audio repeater that had a microphone next to the bell and a speaker / amplifier next to him. Something like that could work if he is in the same house. You would want it to be very close to the speaker in the machine so that it would not be sending other noises in the room and disturbing your sleep.

Baby monitors can perform the same function. You'd have to coordinate turning it on and off appropriately to limit the intrusion to his privacy.

JDS74: That was my plan exactly. I was just hoping for something more direct, or elegant. Thanks for the reinforcement.

ChicagoGranny: He is 31 years old. All data indications are he is still getting 5 - 8 hours of good therapy on it. But it does require constant replacing of the mask by someone else monitoring from in the same room ... pain in the neck. We'd like to get back to him being independent. Perhaps, as you say, he will become more accustomed to it. He has already improved somewhat since he started about 2 months ago. (He has always tossed and turned the first sleep cycle of the night. After that, he's fairly mellow, and usually keeps his mask on all night.)

Thanks both of you.

Certainly not elegant, but direct... Place a bandaid or piece of medical tape across the mask straps onto the cheeks, in hopes the pain from attempting to remove it will wake him enough to become aware and stop the behavior. A few times of feeling pain and the brain will be trained to avoid painful conduct. That said, I agree with being sure his treatment is actually therapeutic and that he's not snatching it off to be able to breathe. My experience with mask removal during sleep was that once my treatment was tweaked and effective, it took very little time after that to stop the behavior.

We've been looking for such a device for a long time with no success. My idea would be something with a pressure sensor. Once started, if the pressure drops for more than x minutes, an alarm goes off until you deactivate it.

Even better would be something wireless where you have to get up and go to another room and push the button. Many people who take off their mask in their sleep will take off the mask, store it neatly, and turn off the CPAP machine. You might even want an optional thing with soft of a drunk test to turn off the alarm. You have to be awake enough to enter a 5 digit code on a keypad to turn it off.

Sounds like a good app for an android device, but you'd need some sort of wireless pressure sensor.

Just brainstorming here...

Some of us use wireless SD cards for recording the data in the machine. If you had one of those, it might be possible for a computer somewhere else in the house to transfer the data from the machine, say, once an hour or half-hour and see if the time on the files transferred has changed or not. If not, then the machine has stopped recording and is no longer providing therapy.

More complicated would be to design an electronic circuit to monitor the amount of current drawn by the machine. When the machine is providing therapy, the current drawn should be significantly higher than when it is off. This could be detected and used to trigger an alarm.

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Tom

Jack, it looks like you posted that on an existing thread rather than starting a new one, which you should do.

Anyway, back to the original question, submit this to ResMed and to Phillips as a feature request. If a machine has auto-start and auto-stop, it already knows that you've taken the mask off -- all it needs is some programming to drive some sort of alarm.