Abstract
Given the engineering complexity of auto-CPAP devices, bench testing is useful for analyzing their performance. Since available bench tests have limitations to simulate complex OSA patterns, we implemented a responsive patient simulator to model events representative of different wake/sleep phases or body posture, including events in wake (irregular breathing, swallowing) and sleep (snoring, flow limitation, hypopneas, apneas). We simulated a patient exhibiting typical features of a woman with OSA, including long sleep latency and low therapeutic nasal pressure required, higher apnea-hypopnea index in REM than in NoREM sleep, lower positional effects on upper airway collapsibility and high proportion of flow limitation episodes (Figure 1). When tested on this simulated patient, several current auto-CPAP devices performed differently, and few of them were able to fully normalize sleep in this simulated patient, highlighting the interest of bench testing and to adequately selecting the device that better fits to each patient phenotype (Figure 2).
Sources of supports: This study was partially funded by a research contract with ResMed.
- Copyright ©ERS 2015
