Sleepyhead questions

Just got the Airsense 10. It's the first time I've had a machine that was capable of utilizing the sleepyhead software. Last night was my first night with it. I just looked at the data in Sleepyhead and it's a little overwhelming.

I understand leak rate and AHI, but there's a lot of other data in there that I don't really understand. Is all the data relevant or can some of it be ignored? For example, time to breath in, time to breath out, volume of breath, respiratory rate, flow limitations, etc. I don't understand the relevance of all that info or what it's supposed to tell me.

What is the best way to understand what all the data means and how I can use it to understand what's happening while I'm sleeping?

I ignore pretty much everything but
AHI
leak
pressure
and the events graph on top
Sometimes I zoom in on the flow rate when I want to figure out if the flagged event was real or if it was a false positive from some awake breathing confusing the machine.

The rest of the stuff is pretty much out of your control anyway and is really more related to breathing and lung stuff that all have such a wide range of norms that it doesn't really mean much.
Helpful maybe if you had some sort of lung problem but then you wouldn't be using SH to evaluate a lung problem.

good job, shaner, on getting the new machine.

i think that the best way to go would be to take screenshots of your sleepyhead graphs then upload them here. then others can analyze your data and tell you exactly what it all means.

there are also some sticky posts above the forum which can help explain sleepyhead and what the individual events mean.

good luck!

To optimize and dial-in therapy the most important graphs are:

• Event Flag
• Flow Rate
• Pressure (I don't like the similar Pressure Mask because with all the volatility it's sometime difficult to tell when the pressure has bumped up against the APAP maximum setting)
• Leak Rate
• Flow Limit

I'd also like to add Resp. Rate. Though this might be very unique to me and my breathing patterns. My sleep obstructive Apnea is closely tied to sleep stage and in particular REM.

Looking at my respiration rate I can clearly see my REM sleep (I've highlighted in Yellow) With REM, comes an increase in Flow Limitation, Leak and you can see APAP respond with more pressure.

I can also, (often but not always) tell when I'm awake. (Highlighted in Blue) My respiration rate drops below my average respiration line. I find this valuable for easily seeing SWJ, they typically show up in clusters, when I've awaken (respiration below line).

As I said, these patterns might be fairly unique to me, they weren't apparent in my early days of CPAP. I was getting used to therapy my breathing was wild and volatile all night and I had no idea when I was asleep or not. I haven't seen any topics where others have mentioned it, and since the respiration is typically not shown on others posted graphs, I haven't seen it in others.

Dog Slobber wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 04, 2019 1:13 pm

I don't like the similar Pressure Mask because with all the volatility it's sometime difficult to tell when the pressure has bumped up against the APAP maximum setting

The pressure chart is best when zoomed out, and mask pressure is often more useful when zoomed way in.