This interview, taped back in September, features Michael Thomas of Sleep Solutions. The company offers the NovaSom QSG Diagnostic Service to identify patients suffering from sleep-disordered breathing, especially Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA).
For those living with OSA, each obstructive event is associated with cyclical increases in systemic and pulmonary artery pressure. The apnea related hypoxemia can cause oxygen saturation to drop, sometimes dramatically. Cardiac arrhythmias during sleep are often associated with OSA. There are several reports suggesting an increased risk of myocardial infarction, stroke and death with OSA.
Sleep Apnea afflicts as many as 18 million Americans of which only 5% have been diagnosed. The U.S. represents approximately half of the worldwide market opportunity for OSA testing (once properly diagnosed, highly effectively treatments are available).
The standard method for diagnosing OSA requires placing the patient in a sleep laboratory overnight and performing polysomnography. This process is expensive, ranging from $1,000 to over $2,500 per night. The estimated 2,200 sleep laboratories in the U.S. can only accommodate a fraction of the patients that require diagnosis.
NovaSom QSG is the first physician-prescribed at-home diagnostic device for OSA that has undergone clinical validation. Delivered directly to the patient through Sleep Solutions’ diagnostic service, the system is the only one cleared by the FDA specifically for unattended use in the patient’s home and clinically proven to be equivalent to in-laboratory PSG.
NovaSom QSG utilizes patented audio digital-signal processing (DSP) technology to sense, analyze, and process the patient’s respiratory sounds and convert these sounds to airflow volume. The device collects up to three nights of sleep data using three small sensors easily applied by the patient, and is then returned to Sleep Solutions for analysis.