Remstar Auto Turning OFF or Missing Data?

Looks like the Auto-ON can't be disabled. (Well, DUH! It's a safety feature! ) Did find the auto-OFF but it was already disabled.

Since only one other person spoke up as also seeing these gaps, I'm inclined to raise minimum pressure up to 5 cm tonight to see if that makes a difference. (Plus, if that works, then RG can be credited for giving good advice again.)

It's been obvious that my max pressure limit needs to go up as well, so maybe it's time to take that up to 12 and see if I get blown away or get that dreaded NR indicator again. (I kinda think the NR simply indicated what I realized later about higher pressures with the FF mask pushing my lower jaw back and inducing apneas that way.)

Regards,
Bill

I have the Respironics bipap pro auto and it doesn't have spaces like you show. Mine starts at the far left when I go to bed and if I get up, it just has a break in the lines. If you notice, it is represented in minutes and hours. Some of yours show the machine off for 15 to 45 minutes. Going to the bathroom only takes me a couple of minutes so only a line break. I believe I would contact Respironics and find out what is happening. Also if it is a new unit, maybe see about a replacement before it is over 30 days old.
The auto on can't be disabled or set, like you said, safety feature.

Also looks like you may need to set you maximum up to about 12. Lots of mask leaks too and high AHI. Over 3 seems high to me and below 1 good.

I made a similar observation back on November 14, in reply to PhillyPat, who was alarmed about "missing time"

viewtopic.php?t=6153&highlight=missing

I also have the Remstar Auto with C-flex, and I just assumed that we were "punished" 10 minutes for getting up to go to the bathroom. My best guess it that it is a bug in their firmware. Or maybe they have some devious reason for doing this but it's so top secret they can't tell us. I vote for "BUG".

Next question, I wonder if they can fix the problem and flash upgrade the firmware. I don't think it matters to me enough to ship the unit back to headquarters to fix it. But for those who live and die by the revered compliance data, maybe they would.

Ric wrote:I also have the Remstar Auto with C-flex, and I just assumed that we were "punished" 10 minutes for getting up to go to the bathroom. My best guess it that it is a bug in their firmware.

Yep, I can believe it's a bug, Ric. It's not the only one either, as yet another bug showed up in last night's data. It's also obvious in last night's data that raising the minimum pressure slightly didn't eliminate the ten minute data gap.


Last night's sleep was also one of those nights which demonstrates why my sleep studies failed; there's not much happening with apneas until more than four hours into the sleep period.

Anyway, today's anomaly is evidenced in the Daily Events chart. Notice that the machine dwelled at 8 cm pressure for only 3.0 minutes, yet recorded 60 apneas.


Now that just cannot happen. Also, it looks like snores and apneas are cross-linked in Encore Pro. At both 8 cm and 9 cm the snore counts are exactly twice the goofy apnea counts. Oh well . . ., at least this stuff doesn't seem to affect the AHI calculation.

Sthnreb, I didn't see it with the BiPAP Auto either, so it appears to be just a Remstar Auto anomaly.

Anyway, none of this stuff is a big deal to me, more a matter of curiosity now that I know it's just bugs. It is interesting though. For years I've wondered why software is so loaded with this really obvious stuff. Best answer I've come up with is that the software developers have to spend so much of their time fixing errant 1's and 0's that they lose track of the big picture. Anyway, that's my theory.

Regards,
Bill

NightHawkeye wrote:Anyway, today's anomaly is evidenced in the Daily Events chart. Notice that the machine dwelled at 8 cm pressure for only 3.0 minutes, yet recorded 60 apneas.

This one is actually easier to explain, and it's not really a "bug" type bug, rather more of an "interpretational anomaly". When looking at that particular chart it is easy to overlook the title which indicates that everything there represents "events per hour", that is to say, a "rate". What they have done is take the three events which were recorded during the three minutes that was spent at a pressure of 8, and calculated a rate of 60. Hence the confusion. Looking carefully at the "OA" line on your "Sleep Therapy Flags" graph, I'm not sure exactly where those 3 tick marks are, it's hard to tell. But I can "calculate" their existence. If in fact one of those tick marks fall on a pressure line where the machine stops (which might be the case here), I would consider it an artifact, since who knows if the pressure might have gone higher and the OA event would have been assigned to a different "pressure bucket". How does that work? Rather than bore you to death here, I have babbled previously about that in a reply to George49 (where I was "guested"), if you're interested:

viewtopic.php?t=6438&highlight=standing+ahi+pressure
viewtopic.php?p=58340&highlight=pressur ... ated#58340

If one wanted to take the time to work it backwards, calculate the actual number of events from the "Daily Events Per Hour" chart, then identify each of those events on the "Sleep Therapy Flags" graph, one would find that they match perfectly one-to-one. (I've done that a few times, just to be sure). Sometimes what appears to be a single tick mark can be two or three tick marks scrunched together. Don't let that fool you.

A more important take-home message is that some of these charts and graphs should be taken with a grain of salt. Note how a single event, or a few can skew the graph way out of proportion. Especially events that are truncated like this one probably is. In my opinion all truncated events should be legitimately deleted from the results, since it is impossible to characterize them adequately. It is not possible to know how long the machine may have lingered at 8 cm, and therefore calculating the OAI as a "rate" represents a pure artifact and is completely meaningless. There can be better ways to represent this data.

Ric wrote:When looking at that particular chart it is easy to overlook the title which indicates that everything there represents "events per hour", that is to say, a "rate".

I knew that, Ric. Really. (Just forgot it. Probably a short-term memory OSA thing.) I guess you can tell how much I've been relying on that chart, huh? You're certainly right that the transitional pressure rates don't seem to mean much. They are sometimes exceptionally high as here and sometimes the machine just seems to blow right through them. (Pardon the pun.)

It was interesting reading back through your links, Ric. Not sure that I caught that thread before. (Of course, that could be the short term memory thing again.)

Ric wrote:A more important take-home message is that some of these charts and graphs should be taken with a grain of salt. Note how a single event, or a few can skew the graph way out of proportion.

An example of something I had been placing too much importance to is the apnea length in MyEncore. I realized a couple of days ago though that the data resolution is in 30 second increments. Consequently, when the apneas are clustered together as mine are, it's easy to get false numbers. For all I know the machine might even fail to record a quick breath. When I realized the resolution I abandoned hope of obtaining anything useful from it. My oximeter tells a much more accurate story, although not without its own faults.

Regards,
Bill

Seems pretty definite that it's a design bug, likely in firmware, which causes the Remstar Auto to randomly exhibit that 10 minute data gap when turned ON.

Here's last night's chart from the replacement machine. It has a gap each time it was turned on. At least the card reader in it doesn't give those nasty C-1 errors any more though.


BTW, the pressure rise at the far right in the chart happened after I rolled over onto my back, so I guess I've got the answer to that question now too, about whether I need a different pressure when I'm on my back.

Regards,
Bill