It took me two years to develop basic understanding of the industry – sleep apnea diagnostics is complex.
It is multidisciplinary field that is an intersection of sleep medicine with medical informatics, deep tech, wearables, ethics and involves specialities like neurology, pulmonology, cardiology and many more.
There was a lot to take in.
The hypothesis
I wanted to verify if the following idea was worth anything: the way we breathe and the breathing sounds we produce, they carry patterns that correspond to the current state of our health. Our breath changes in unique ways and reacts basically to everything. Not only to everything we are exposed to, but also to the processes on the inside, like emotions and diseases. It’s been shown for instance, that breathing signals recorded at night, can be used for Parkinson’s disease detection. As I’ve experienced first hand what sleep apnea events are, I started wondering:
“Is it possible to use breathing sounds for obstructive sleep apnea detection (OSA)?”
There is already a lot of evidence for this. I decided, I would like to face the challenge of creating acoustic-based solution for OSA detection.
Connecting the dots
I started from sharing the idea with as many people as possible. The more I learnt about the topic, the less I knew, literally. The progress seemed non-existent, but in the same time, there was kind of enjoyment and it felt totally ok to go with baby steps:
- “Slow” allows maturing. The vision becomes clearer, the idea becomes better articulated and there is time for digestion of the input you get from very smart people.
- “Fast” creates excitement, momentum and even adrenaline, but kills true enjoyment. There is time for “fast”. If the dots are discovered, it seems that connecting them is a very straightforward and almost instant process. With full respect to people met along the way, they are not “dots”.
