It’s good to have options. This app isn’t about perfect, it’s about good enough. I will admit that I do wish that I had spent a few more days researching this project prior to launching it, but I nevertheless feel reluctant to file this one as a mistake. Soon, I will have obligations to hold up, and I plan on doing my best. I feel that I can serve a community of users who may be suffering from a range of sleep disorders or perhaps mental or physical illnesses, who may benefit from multi-night polysomnography, but cannot afford to acquire such hardware, or even more unobtainable, the expertise of a technician. I’m someone who already does fall into this category. As such, I want to do as much as possible, with as little as possible.
Breath tracking (respiration) via amplification, noise filtering and then multi-band-pass filtering incoming audio data from the microphone is a huge trove of data already. The hard part of that will be listening for changes in the volume of breathing, which is very significant data.
Maybe one day, I will create a DIY free software type whatever polysomnograph, but that’s likely going to cost people a lot of money to make themselves.
The primary benefit of a real sleep study is that a technician interprets your data. In both this case and the fictional DIY kit, the data is interpreted for you automatically via software. The primary drawback is accessibility, cost, and the requirement of a technician.
EEG is reserved for type 1 tests, which are the absolute best, but don’t really make practical sense to me as a mobile phone app. Those who need a type 1 test may benefit from an actual DIY kit, but then this only makes sense if the user doesn’t have public healthcare coverage, and the kit isn’t likely to benefit the user past night one unless they’re using it for therapy, and if they are, they’re definitely going overkill.
Again, my focus is on utilizing existing hardware, and replacing the need for a tech. Give everyone a sub-par but universally accessible option, completely free.