Which Pulse Oxymeter Should I Buy?

SGearhart wrote:You sparked my curiosity about how many sessions the 50I will record. The manual stated 5 and you had 10. Although they were short ones, I kept starting and stopping the sessions. The 50I finally declared a memory limit at 15 sessions.

I know, we can all sleep better tonight armed with this knowledge.

I appreciate your scientific dedication, good sir!

ChicagoGranny wrote:

dvejr wrote:I have a very old CPAP

Wow, I would put the oximeter money toward a new CPAP machine. Oximeters are a poor tool for managing CPAP therapy. It's much better to have a data-capable machine and use SleepyHead to manage your therapy.

You might be able to significantly fine tune and improve your therapy with a new machine. An oximeter is a crude way to attempt it.

I disagree with all due respect. One aspect of determining the efficacy of treatment is to monitor both SpO2 while asleep as well as pulse rate. If one has a BP meter (hospital grade, automatic, recording), BP is a good piece of information to have as well.

Desats during sleep (anything under 89% SpO2) are significant. One should also see pulse rate rise somewhat and BP spike. This is a recipe for stroke.

Also, there are a significant number of CPAP/APAP users that find themselves breathing much more shallow just prior to REM sleep. The autonomic nervous system arouses them hollering "breath! breath!".... what results is a less than optimal treatment of the apnea problem and the introduction of a host of other afflictions. Sleep apnea is associated with the onset of a plethora of associated afflictions, including diabetes, chronic hypertension, atrial fibrillation and other arrhythmias and so on. Desats of SpO2 should be taken seriously. Personally? I have been infusing 4-5L/m of oxygen into the airflow from my blower for the past five years in order to keep my SpO2 above 90% and in the 95% range. The quality of sleep is vastly superior without the desats.

Pulse oximeters are inexpensive and the Contec line is more than satisfactory ( I use the Contec CMS50E series including the Bluetooth version CMS50EW for convenience). I could never figure out why I was so tired in the mornings after 6 - 8 hours in bed until I got a series of oximetry data aligned with the data from my APAP blower. It became immediately obvious as to the cause.

For $100 you can't go wrong.

There are a lot of problems with your argument Toronto. And maybe with your therapy.

For one,

torontoCPAPguy wrote:Personally? I have been infusing 4-5L/m of oxygen into the airflow from my blower for the past five years in order to keep my SpO2 above 90% and in the 95% range.

So why are you taking that much oxygen? You know that is a lot of oxygen? You must have a lung disease. Right?

So you are not looking at this from the point of the OP who seems to have healthy lungs. You are looking at it from the point of someone with very unhealthy lungs. Right?

torontoCPAPguy wrote:Sleep apnea is associated with the onset of a plethora of associated afflictions, including diabetes, chronic hypertension, atrial fibrillation and other arrhythmias and so on. Desats of SpO2 should be taken seriously.

The dangers of sleep apnea are well known on this forum and lecturing us about them is just fluff that adds nothing to your argument to spend the money first on an oximeter and not on a data-capable CPAP machine.

torontoCPAPguy wrote: If one has a BP meter (hospital grade, automatic, recording), BP is a good piece of information to have as well.

Totally irrelevant. The OP is not going to spend the money to get a hospital grade device that records blood pressure. You have just thrown this in to try to bolster your argument.

torontoCPAPguy wrote:One aspect of determining the efficacy of treatment is to monitor both SpO2 while asleep as well as pulse rate.

Now your profile shows you have an S9 AutoSet and that is a data-capable machine. Would you be willing to give that machine up and use a non-data capable brick along with your oximeter? If you are not willing to use a brick then your own argument falls apart because the OP is using a brick.

dvejr wrote: Because I have a very old CPAP I have no downloadable data to help me figure out how my treatment is coming along.

I would put my money toward correcting this issue before spending any money on an oximeter if I were the OP. I am a little puzzled why you argue against this. I know the forum is unanimously adamant about having a data-capable machine. Why do you skip over this and argue his money should first be spent on an oximeter?