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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Sleep for All (Diagnostics of sleep disorders for all patient groups)

Teaser

Summary

Nox Medical will develop and bring to market disruptive technology in sleep diagnostics to address an epidemic which costs Europe more than â‚¬ 300 billion annually. Nox Medical is a leading company in the field of sleep diagnostics equipment. Based on our experience and market positioning we plan to revolutionize sleep diagnostics by improving the diagnostic power of our products and making them accessible to a much larger market. Current sleep diagnosis methods and criteria are based on findings which were made before computers were common place in the hospital environment. Since then, a range of biomarkers and diagnostics protocols have been discovered, validated, and published in scientific journals. These biomarkers and diagnostics protocols have not been integrated into routine diagnosis. This is partly due to technological challenges and partly due to the conservative nature of medicine. By adopting these biomarkers and diagnostics protocols into state of the art diagnostics products, Nox Medical is bridging the gap between research and clinical application. The resulting products will allow more sleep studies being performed in the home environment, instead of being performed inside a hospital. This will allow better patient stratification, reduction of cost, and make sleep diagnosis available to a much larger market. The results of the project open up a possibility of revolutionising the business model behind sleep diagnostics by offering sleep diagnostics as a service, similar to a model commonly used in software marketing today.

Work performed

New methods have been developed to measure the quality of breathing in a sleeping patient. The methods are based on published scientific work of leading experts in the field of sleep medicine. The new methods have been automated and adopted to software in close collaboration the scientists. The new methods can be used to identify the underlying cause of obstructed breathing during sleep and used to determine the appropriate treatment path targeted at the underlying cause. This is the first step towards personalized treatment to obstructed breathing during sleep.
Two new methods have been developed and validated to measure the quality of sleeping. The first method includes a new setup to measure electroencephalograms (EEG) and using them to determine sleep stages of a person. The new EEG setup allows a patient to set up the EEG on them selves. The second method is based on determining the quality of sleep using biological signals other than EEG. The method introduces the possibility to estimate the quality of sleep during regular respiratory sleep studies with no extra burden on the patient and no extra cost to the heath care provider conducting the study.
The ergonomics of setting up medical devices to measure sleep have been improved in such away that an unskilled person can follow step-by-step instructions to set up the devices, allowing sleep clinics to perform more sleep studies using their current resources.

Final results

A foundation has been laid for the future of sleep medicine. This future brings sleep medicine from the ways established in the 1960â€™s when measurement technology was primitive and digital data processing was not available, to the current state of the art in measurement technology, data processing, and artificial intelligence. The new era of sleep medicine will focus on identifying the underlying cause of the sleep disorders and targeting therapy on those issues, providing personalized treatment specific to the underlying causes. These developments will have the greatest impacts on clinical populations such as children, women, and particularly pregnant women, who often are often impacted by sleep disorders without fulfilling the standard diagnosis criteria.
The work carried out in the project has shown great promise and has captured the interest of many of the most prominent scientists and key opinion leaders in the field of sleep medicine who aim to apply the new methods to their future work.