Faking out cpap

I've been having wildly changing ahi's (mostly all hi's) at the same pressure so I did an experiment with my Intellipap. First I sat watching tv with cpap running for about an hour and the machine reported no events. Then I sat watching tv for another hour frequently adjusting the mask for leaks (as I do when I'm really sleeping), letting it leak for a couple of seconds every so often. The machine reported 16 hi's per hours. I'm trying to figure out if the hi's it's showing at night could be from me moving around, adjusting the mask etc. It appears that this might be the case. I'm wondering if this is an intellipap issue or do all cpaps report events that aren't really breathing related.

My experience is that you are correct. Of the four masks that I have, occasionally I've veered away from my trusted Mirage and used another.
For example, when I catch a cold, I revert over to my Quattro FF mask, but haven't had a lot of success. I also sometimes use the Swift LT. But to the point, sometimes when I'm not feeling well, or have a "bad" night, I sometimes lie awake for as much as an hour of more, and during this time, I cough or scratch my nose by lifting up the mask for a second or two. Also, I forget to turn off the machine before I take the mask off. Heck, once I meant to turn off the machine, and accidentally turned off my radio, just inches from my nose, then thought to myself, "why is my machine still on?" crazy me. Invariably, I have high AHI's on nights like this.
When your AHI's are higher than the measurements that resulted from your sleep study, its a good chance that it is one of these things and not your OSA worsening.

Jay

I'd get a GameBoy to play with, you can't SIM sleeping with a APAP, you can play with them but it's not as rewarding as beating a GameBoy. Jim

Events recorded while you are awake are meaningless.

These machines & software are designed to most accurately record events when you are sleeping... our breathing changes when we sleep so that is what they are programmed to watch.

I used to use my machine without RAMP or SETTLING and found the scores significantly higher than after using those. Why? Because during RAMP or SETTLING the machine does not record events.... because those events are meaningless until you fall asleep.

stejoel wrote: The machine reported 16 hi's per hours. I'm trying to figure out if the hi's it's showing at night could be from me moving around, adjusting the mask etc. It appears that this might be the case. I'm wondering if this is an intellipap issue or do all cpaps report events that aren't really breathing related.

Moving around and adjusting you mask could be recorded as hypopneas by other machine as well. There are two reasons for this: the first it that in tuning around many of us do have hypopneas, or even open airway (i.e. central) apneas.
The second is the machines' algorithm:
In order to tag a breath as "apnea" or "hypopnea" the algorithms of these machines go through some pretty complex statistical calculations - comparing all kinds or properties of the present breath with a bunch of breaths preceding it. Wakefulness is usually not accompanied by regular breathing so wakeful breathing may often give weird results - including hypopneas.

Your experiment was a good idea - but,because of how the algorithms work, you may have found more (false positive) events than you expected during that first, rather quiet hour.

Look at the software charts: can you see the correlation there between the appearance of hypopneas and the appearance of leaks?

O.