The University of Washington (UW) has developed an app that can help detect sleep apnea. Called ApneaApp, the app development was funded by the National Science Foundation and the University of Washington.

Current sleep apnea diagnosis include sensors attached to the user’s body and special equipment, whereas ApneaApp promises to do the same thing with nothing but a phone, relying on inaudible sound waves emanating from the phone’s speakers to track breathing patterns.

“Right now phones have sensing capabilities that we don’t fully appreciate,” Director of the UW Networks and Mobile Systems lab Shyam Gollakota said in a statement. “If you can recalibrate the sensors that most phones already have, you can use them to achieve really amazing things.”

To prove its case, the University of Washington has conducted a small clinical study involving 37 patients at Harborview Medical Center. Researchers found that 98% of the time ApneaApp captured sleep apnea events as accurately as a hospital polysomnography tests. The app running on the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone was able to track different respiratory events over 300 hours of testing, including central apnea, obstructive apnea, and hypopnea. These tests had between 95 and 99 percent accuracy when compared to intensive polysomnography.

The next step for UW researchers would be to get an FDA approval, after which ApneaApp could be available to consumers in a year or two.

“These initial results are impressive and suggest that ApneaApp has the potential to be a simple, noninvasive way for the average person to identify sleep apnea events at home and hopefully seek treatment,” said professor of Neurology and co-director of the UW Medicine Sleep Center Dr. Nathaniel F. Watson.

[Via: mobihealthnews]