Sleep Free OSA - at home sleep apnoea diagnostic wearable

Around 936 million adults live with obstructive sleep apnoea. Roughly four in five of them do not know it. The test that would tell them means a referral, a waiting list and a night spent sleeping in a room that is not theirs, wired to a machine — which is a strange way to measure how somebody sleeps.

The standard treatment, CPAP, is abandoned by a large share of the people prescribed it. The mask, the hose and the noise put people off before the therapy has a chance to work. So the design brief was not only to detect apnoea, but to build something a person would still be wearing on the second night.

A soft chin-anchored cap connects to a bedside dock. It belongs to the same product class as Zeus Sleep and Signifier's eXciteOSA, and was taken from clinical research through self-built electronics and bench testing to a design-for-manufacture proposal.

Conductive-fabric electrodes under the chin sense whether the device is being worn, and that reading wakes the system out of sleep mode. The wake then powers everything else: a microphone listening to the breath, an optical sensor for heart rate and blood-oxygen desaturation, and a motion sensor for sleeping position.

The question was how to measure airway patency. The first answer was electrical: silver-conductive fabric electrodes under the chin, reading tongue and neck muscle. Across five configurations they beat the clinical silver/silver-chloride standard — and still could not say how open the airway was. The microphone could. Acoustic sensing became the diagnostic; the electrodes now sense wear.

Comfort findings, reported as they came. Neon-green elastic straps performed best overall, because they adapted most consistently across different head shapes — though the routing across the front of the chin is still not right. A soft chin pillow beat hard plastic outright. Several early strap designs came off entirely during a night's sleep. Any electronics at the chin must stay inside the submental triangle to avoid the nerve layout in the neck.

Two devices: injection-moulded rigid housings, a cut-and-sew textile strap with sonically welded edges, and a custom PCB in each, laid out for the sensor set and sent for contract assembly. Cost is modelled across three annual volumes on a direct, indirect and tooling-amortised basis.

System cost of goods across three volume tiers.

Version one is a consumer wellness product — snore monitoring and sleep-quality feedback — not a regulated medical device. A later therapeutic version is planned as a regulated route.

Of the 936 million adults with the condition, the plausibly reachable and already-aware market is around 50 million. A target of 100,000 units a year is about 0.2 per cent of that.