- Today I'm gonna show you a quick, easy
and affordable way, to scan yourself for asleep apnea
in the comfort of your own home
in your own bed, using nothing
but this ring.
Stick around
and I'll show you how.
(upbeat music)
Hi everyone, my name's Nick
and welcome to my channel, CPAP reviews.
For those of you tuning in for the very first time
it's great to be with you.
This is my education channel on snoring and sleep apnea
and some of the products that we use to diagnose
and treat those conditions.
So if that's something that you're interested in,
please consider hitting that subscribe button
and joining our great community.
And for all the regular viewers out there
you know who you are.
I really appreciate your support throughout the years.
Those of you who've previously done a sleep test
would probably report back
that it's not the most enjoyable experience in the world.
Getting all those wires put all over you
and things up your nose,
and then being asked, "Yeah, go to sleep now,
we'll monitor you through the night
and make sure you're breathing okay."
You might be thinking to yourself,
is this the best way to check my sleep
in this really unfamiliar environment
with all this stuff on me?
And look, there are different levels of sleep tests.
There are some that are really in-depth
but then there's other tests which are more screening tests.
They're just gonna give you an idea
as to if there is something going on in your sleep.
It's gonna tell you
whether or not your breathing is pretty good
or maybe it's pretty average
and you probably need to investigate a little bit further.
And I think in today's day and age
with all that's going on in COVID, you know,
this is a really easy, quick and affordable way
just to give yourself a quick check
to make sure that there's nothing going on in your sleep.
Now let's be brutally honest here.
Majority of you who have sleep apnea,
probably know that there is something going on
with your sleep.
If you really think about it, you know,
you've probably been told by someone along the line
maybe a partner or a friend that you stop breathing
or you gasp a little bit during the night,
you've probably been told that you snore like a truck
or that you know you rattle the walls, something like that.
And you probably also notice,
if you sit down and think about them,
some of the signs and symptoms,
and I'm talking about, you know
falling asleep on the couch in the early afternoon
or just being constantly tired and irritable,
being in a bad mood, being moody, forgetful,
maybe you've got some of these health conditions as well
such as high blood pressure or diabetes,
if you're overweight, that's a big giveaway sign as well.
So, even without having any testing done,
if you really just sit there
and just analyze yourself,
you're probably gonna get a good idea
as to whether or not you've got something going on
in your sleep.
And nine times out of 10
if you have any of those sorts of symptoms going on there
chances are you do have something to look at
and it's gonna be either mild, moderate or severe
depending on how many times you're having apnea
during the night per hour.
So how do we do this screen?
Well, we use this little device here on my finger
called an O2 Ring
and basically this little ring
monitors my blood oxygen levels
and also my heart rate continuously through the night.
And we can then use that information
as a bit of a guide to see if we have anything going on
with our breathing during the nighttime.
Most healthy adults with no sort of lung conditions
are gonna have blood oxygen concentrations
probably above 94, 95.
You know, those really good athletic types
are probably gonna have oxygen levels at 98, 99,
and maybe some of you smokers out there
are gonna have blood oxygen levels a little bit lower
maybe sort of 92, 93, even lower
depending on how bad your lungs are.
The Greek word apnea literally means without breath.
So if you're someone who's suffering
from sleep apnea episodes during the nighttime,
it basically means
that there's a restriction in your upper airway
that's limiting the amount of oxygen
getting into your blood.
And when this happens, our oxygen levels drop
and our brain which monitors is information,
wakes us up out of sleep so that we take a quick breath
and our oxygen levels rise up again
and then the cycle repeats itself many, many times
during the night.
But it's this drop in blood oxygen
that's really the cause of all the problems.
It's the interruption in our sleep,
it puts the body under a lot of stress.
It puts the heart in a lot of stress
and it causes all those nasty things like fatigue,
high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems
and just feeling like crap at the end of the day.
So it's really nice to be able to do this
in the comfort of your own home,
you can run it over a few nights
just to give yourself a really good screening tool
as to whether or not your blood oxygen levels
are staying nice and stable, throughout the night,
or are you having all these episodes of desaturations
where your oxygen levels are dropping down to 85, 80, 75,
where you're stopping breathing throughout the night.
That's the only way it can really happen,
I mean, either the ring's falling off your finger
or you're stopping breathing
But I'm gonna show you some data in a minute.
I'm gonna talk more about this ring,
and we're gonna go through some examples
on what to look for
if you're doing a bit of a home sleep test screen.
Already, so here we have it.
The Wellue O2 Ring.
So I'll just do a quick unboxing for you
so you can see it up close and personal.
And then here's the little,
little ring here.
It's really comfortable to wear.
It's really soft.
You hardly even know you're wearing it.
And then you've also got a USB charging cable.
So when you first get it, plug into the computer
and you just plug the charger in the back here
and, you know, charges up over a couple of hours
and then it's good to go.
So there's no real on or off switch with it,
when you put it on your finger, it turns on,
and then when you take it off your finger, it turns off.
When you're ready to use it
the first thing you wanna do is, download the app ViHealth.
All right it is here, ViHealth.
And it says here ViHealth would like to use Bluetooth,
so make sure you've got Bluetooth on your phone on,
but don't connect through your phones
Bluetooth through the settings of the phone.
You wanna connect through the actual app itself.
So just click OK,
it's gonna search for the ring just have it close by,
it comes with the O2 Ring, click on the O2 Ring
and then you just tap on the top of the device
where it says the tap there,
so at the top of the device, we just tap.
So you can see here
that this has already loaded some data
that I already had on the ring
from when I was just wearing it around earlier.
So if we go into here,
we can actually already start pulling up some data
just when I was walking around the house
for an hour and a half.
Another really cool feature of this ring
is that you can actually set it up to vibrate
if your oxygen levels
or your heart rate go below a certain criteria.
So this is kind of cool
because basically for some of you, you might, you know,
only have sleep apnea on your back,
when you're on your back.
So you can set this up
if we go to settings
and we go to SpO2 Reminder,
we can actually set here in SpO2 Threshold,
so we can change what this threshold is.
So let's just say 90.
So I've got an SpO2 threshold of 90,
now I can set here device vibration intensity.
So we've got very weak, weak, medium, strong, very strong.
And if I have it very strong,
that is vibrating very very strong on my finger.
So it's literally gonna wake me up out of sleep,
no problem about that.
So if I'm on my back, I start having sleep apnea
and my oxygen levels dropped below 90,
this ring's gonna vibrate, wake me up,
basically telling me
that something's going on with my sleep,
I need to change the issue,
maybe I need to go onto my side.
So you can also use that as, you know,
basically a trigger to tell you that something's going on.
If you've got sleep apnea,
you're gonna have this thing probably buzzing
all night, throughout the night
so that'll really give you an idea
before you even wake up in the morning
as to whether or not you've got sleep apnea
'cause you just have these thing
buzzing on your finger all night.
You can play around with that,
it's a really cool little feature.
If you're wearing it for a night
and say you wanna get up and do something
and take it off your finger,
if you take it off,
it'll start counting down from 10 seconds.
If you put it back on in that 10 seconds,
it'll keep recording from the same chunk of recording.
If you take it off though and that 10 seconds goes,
then the next time you put it on
it'll provide you with a new recording.
So once it's on your finger, it's on.
When you connect it to the app
it will automatically sync the time
but you can check the time
just by clicking the little button on the top here
and it'll show you.
All right guys, it's time for bed.
It's about 11 o'clock here in Melbourne
and the whole family is asleep.
I've got my O2 Ring on, a little glow stick,
ET phone home
and I'll let you know how the results go in the morning,
cheers.
So this is my results from last night
and it's actually really interesting.
So the little buzzer on my finger
actually went off, couple of hours into sleep.
And I woke up in quite a shock
cause I really didn't expect it to go off,
but you can see here
that my pulse rate just went through the roof
and this was also coupled with my oxygen levels
dropping below 90
and triggering the ring to vibrate
to sort of wake me up out of sleep.
I'm assuming this is when I was in REM sleep,
when I was dreaming.
And this pulse rate
is because I was having some sort of dream.
I don't know if it was a nightmare
or maybe it was a good dream.
I don't know,
but whatever it was, yeah, the ring woke me up
just to say that your blood oxygen levels are dropping
but it was only the one time during the night
but you can also see a few other little spots here
where I sort of dipped into that orange zone
and that would have also been probably REM sleep
when I was dreaming
or maybe perhaps when I was on my back.
But like overall, if we go sort of from the start to finish,
that most of it's in the green there
and if we go to the stat there,
you can see here that at the very top it says,
the amount of time below 90,
and that was only 40 seconds.
So 40 seconds of the whole night below 90%,
so I'm pretty good, I'm in the clear here.
I'll just run through some of these other stats
'cause they're quite interesting
and then after this,
I'll actually show you someone else's results.
So you can see the difference
between someone who's got reasonably good breathing
and someone who's struggling a bit
and probably needs to investigate a bit further.
All right, so starting on the top left,
we've got the recording time.
So that's how long I had the device on for,
so close to eight hours.
Now I wasn't asleep for those eight hours
because I've got a brand new baby
but that's how long I had the ring on for, drops over 4%.
So only four times it dropped over 4%, which is fine.
My average was 96%,
so that's all the oxygen levels throughout the night
averaged out equals 96%,
so nice and high, I'm really happy with that.
And then my O2 score, so 9.6,
so that's an A plus, in my language,
and I'm up here in the nice,
if you'd go to the right here,
you can see I'm up here in the nice green section
which means my breathing is really good.
My average heart rate is 66
which is also in a really good spot
and on the app it'll show you.
Once again sort of this range between red and green
so you can get an idea
as to where your heart rate should be.
And then we've got drops per hour.
This is kind of like your apnea hypopnea index,
like how many times per hour
you're having, you know, events.
Apnea hypopnea,
and then the lowest oxygen level that it went down to 88%
which is right here where it triggered it off.
So I really enjoyed doing this
and I'm gonna do it again tonight
because I'm fascinated to see how this went
and I'm glad it's going well
but at the same time
I'm very interested to see this really high pulse rate here
coupled with this oxygen desaturation.
And that ring did wake me up.
It did its job
and I was on my back
and I roll onto my side
and obviously when I rolled onto my side,
my heart rate drops right down
and my oxygen levels went back up again.
All right, so let's cross now
to someone who's got completely different results.
Okay, so just to make it nice and easy for comparison,
I have my results from last night on the left-hand side
and another person's on the right.
And the first thing I wanna draw your attention to
is with my results obviously, with the oxygen levels,
they're pretty stable,
there's a lot of green bars, not many orange bars
but if we come across here to that person on the right,
you'll see that there's far more orange bars happening
during the night.
In fact this person had 65 times
where their oxygen levels dropped over 4%
compared with mine, which was only four times.
And each one of these times,
when this person had a drop of a 4%,
the brain would have basically been coming out of sleep
to tell the body to wake up and have a breath
because it sense there's a problem,
it knows it's not getting the oxygen it needs,
so there's 65 interruptions during the night
and that's gonna play havoc with the sleep cycle,
it's gonna make it very fragmented,
make it very difficult for this person
to get into a nice deep sleep
and get into that nice good REM sleep,
where they're gonna do their dreams,
and so they're gonna wake up
even though they're gonna have eight hours of sleep,
they're gonna wake up feeling very average
because they've just had so many interruptions
because of their breathing.
Now, if I had to make a guess here,
I'd be saying this person in particular,
would be in the mild to moderate category.
You can see here from this little graph up the top,
that they're drifting down into that, you know,
that yellow zone.
But if you're someone
who's having a lot more oxygen desaturations than this,
and maybe there's oxygen desaturations
are going into the red zone, then you know,
you're more than likely gonna have moderate
or severe sleep apnea
and this is basically how we do the screen
and it's really simple, really basic
and you can do it as many times as you like.
Now, if you're already diagnosed with sleep apnea
and you're using CPAP therapy to treat it,
you can actually use this ring
to check how effective your therapy levels are,
in controlling your sleep apnea.
For example, we can go to a bit of a nighttime
and put our mask on
and wear the ring,
and in the morning when we get up, we can check our app
and have a look at our oxygen saturation levels
in our blood.
Now, if those oxygen saturation levels are nice and steady,
nice and high,
and there's not too much going on,
then we know that our therapy
is really controlling our sleep apnea,
it's doing a great job to even out our breathing,
and it's just opening up all those blockages.
If we wake up in the morning
and we have a look at that little graph
of our oxygen saturation
and we're seeing all these big dips in our oxygen level,
maybe it's going from 94 down to 85
or 94 down to 89,
but it's happening throughout the night,
then we might need to make some adjustments
to our therapy levels.
Maybe we need to just bump up that pressure
just a little bit
to get a little bit more control of our sleep apnea.
So that's just another great way you can use this ring
just to monitor your sleep apnea
and your CPAP therapy.
Now, guys, if you wanna go out
and pick yourself up an O2 Ring
so you can start screening yourself
or your friends or your family for sleep apnea,
then I'll put a link
in the description of the video down below
where you can pick them up from.
They're FDA approved so you know their quality
and the data is very reliable.
And when you're checking out,
if you use the coupon code CPAP reviews,
you're gonna get an extra 10% off
what is already a really reasonable price of $169.
And that gets you your ring
and access to the app
and you can use it as many times as you want
with as many people as you want.
And you can go ahead and screen yourself
in the comfort of your own home,
just to see if maybe there is something going on
with your sleep.
But I reckon, many of you already know.
If you have any questions
or you need a little bit more information,
then feel free to put a comment in the comment section below
and I'll do my best to help you out.
If you enjoy the video
and you'd like to show your support
then please consider hitting that like button
and subscribing to the channel.
And until next time, sleep well, be safe
and look out for one another.
Bye for now.