A development of mechanism for reducing snoring

Obstructive sleep apnea, the most common form of sleep apnea, is caused by upper airway partial or complete blockage. It has been implicated in the etiology of cardiovascular diseases. Many studies were performed that snoring, which occurs in at least 20% of the general population and 50% of the 50-year-old men, is recognized as the cardinal symptom of OSA. It is critical to prevent development of sleep apnea through control of snoring in early stage. In this study, a new mechanism was developed to detect the snoring sounds automatically and reduce snoring by inflation of air bladder inside the pillow. Clinical evaluation of developed mechanism was performed with the use of polysomnograph (PSG) at the sleep center in Korea. A volunteer was participated for clinical study to test the effectiveness of snore stopping function for one night, 190 minutes with the developed mechanism powered off and 172.5 minutes with the same developed mechanism powered on. In case of PSG results, sleep efficiency is reduced 8.5% for the second half of the sleep. Snoring statistics shows highly meaningful values with the use of developed mechanism. Snoring time was reduced about 63% with the use of developed mechanism. Number of snoring episode was increased 58.3%, however, it may not be directly related with the effectiveness of developed mechanism since the purpose of the pillow is not for reducing snoring episodes. Average snoring episode shows quite amount of decrement from 3.2 minutes to 0.5 minutes. Longest snoring episode was reduced about 95%, and it means that developed mechanism discontinued snoring successfully whenever it detects snoring sounds. The further study would be continued for more wide clinical studies with various inflation/deflation conditions of air bladder.