Sleepyhead software respironics

Awesome page! I have been thinking about writing more in the Cpap arena. I plan on writingr more info on interpreting the data from the machines' sd card. Glad I could help! This is really interesting - I am writing a hub about sleeping comfortably with a CPAP and am glad I came across this one. I will have to try it with my ResMed.

I have linked this hub to mine and will be publishing it shortly. Voted up. I found it today, but can't get it to read data from the SD chip or hard-drive folder.

I successfully upgraded to v0. I pointed the Import button to E: for the SD card. It appears to read my machine info: Respironics p, serial etc. But first Use and Last Use are blank.

I'm glad it works well for you. You may also want to just try swapping out the SD card. Some SD Cards have a "write tab" like the old floppy disks, or the card might even be full, it may not be your machine. Downloaded and tried the software myself. It is nice to see the data and know in a way what is going on. One thing I found out was my machine stopped recording data months ago.

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Define an unlimited number of dynamic, time-synchronized workspaces to suit individual workflow preferences during acquisition, scoring and physician review. The Standard mode, which is shown here, is the default mode and it provides summary numbers for standard CPAP data reported for time ranging from the Most Recent latest one-night data to the data for the last year.

The Monthly report gives summary numbers for each of the last 12 calendar months of data. Changes to Prescription Settings. For a newbie, this chart should be relatively straightforward.

Machine Information chart. This shows the make, model, and serial number for each CPAP machine that you've used with SleepyHead, as well as the first and last dates of usage. The idea behind the Statistics Page is to provide a quick numerical view of the most important numbers from the efficacy data. This is the data that most Durable Medical Equipment DME suppliers print out from the proprietary software if the sleep doctor or insurance company wants more than just usage data.

The organization of the summary data in the proprietary software varies from brand to brand, and we won't look at how the proprietary software organizes this data. The dates of the range of data is also listed. As you accumulate more and more data, you will start to notice that the numbers in the Last 6 months and Last year do not change very much from day to day.

We'll examine each of them in turn. The first two lines concern usage or compliance data:. The numbers for Average hours per night is a simple average: Add up the usage for each night in the time period and divide by the number of days in the time period.

We can see that the patient didn't get much sleep last night July 4 and that she is averaging about 6 hours of mask time and bed time over the last year. There's a bit of variation between the 7-day, day, 6-month, and 1-year figures, but the variation is not significant.

SleepyHead defines Compliance for a given night as "usage is at least four hours". The line for defining Compliance can be set in the SleepyHead preferences if desired. The percentage in the Compliance column is simply the percentage of days in the time period where the usage was at least four hours. Of the 15 days where she was not compliant, most of them are nights where she got less than 4 hours of sleep.

Notably, however, two nights were sleep tests performed during the past summer. Here are one patient's Therapy Efficacy data:. Exactly which indices will be listed here depends on the machine you are using:. The long term indices are computed in the same way the nightly indices are computed: SleepyHead counts the number of events recorded during the time frame for the index and divides that by the total run time for the time frame.

In other words the long term indices are long term averages. In other words, in the last 6 months, she had an average of 1. Some hours she had a lot more than that; other hours she had no events. But the expected number of events per hour of sleep would be events each hour. When we look at the numbers in aggregate, we can see some interesting things about this patient's data:. SleepyHead uses Leak to represent the excess or unintentional leak rate.

In other words, for machines that record Total Leak Rate data, it's important to understand that. SleepyHead uses a statistical analysis to estimate the intentional leak rate from the Total Leak Rate data and uses that to compute the Leak Rate.

If there are n points on the entire list, we first find the integer k that is equal to or just barely bigger than 0. Which means that long term, she has no serious leak problems to worry about. The average leak rate for a given time frame is just the weighted average for all the leak data in that time frame. In other words to compute the 7 day average leak rate, we look at all the leak rate data for the last 7 days as one data set and find the weighted average for the large data set.

Loosely speaking, the CPAP machine has sampled the leak rate some very large, but finite number of times in the last 7 days. You add up all the "leak rate data points for the last 7 days" and divide by the total number of data points in the 7 days and you get the weighted average leak rate for the last 7 days. The average leak rate for the last 30 days, last 6 months, and last year is computed the same way: Informally, you add up all the sample leak rate data points for the last 30 days, 6 months, or year respectively and divide by the total number of data points for the same period of time.

Understanding the long term average leak rate numbers is a bit more difficult simply because average leak rates do not have a simple "time" interpretation. Technically speaking, the leak curve is a continuous graph for each night. For the 7-day average leak rate, we string all seven of the leak curves together to get one very long curve that traps a finite amount of area between it and the horizontal axes for the graph. The 7-day average value for the leak rate would be the area under the 7-day leak curve divided by the total time the machine was running for the last 7 days.

In other words, the 7-day average leak rate is just the average height of the leak curve over the course of the last 7 nights. The idea is that the area under the curve really can just be thought of as the sum of the data points and the length of time is then just the number of data points.

Note: Because of the way weighted averages are computed, we cannot conclude anything about how long the leak rate was AT or BELOW the 7-day, day, 6-month, or 1-year average leak rates. Your minimum pressure level and your average pressure level will be less than your pressure setting if you use the Ramp feature.

The minimum pressure level will most likely be the starting Ramp pressure. A sample patient's summary Pressure Statistics data looks like this:. So if a number obviously does not make sense, its best to disregard it. When you select Preferences off the appropriate menu, a Preferences panel will come up. Regardless of whether you are using a Mac or a Windows computer, the Preferences panel will look the same. The default starting place in the Preferences panel is the Import pane.

The Import tab of the Preferences panel looks like this:. While looking at the Import tab of the Preferences panel, there are only two settings for a newbie to really worry about:. All other settings on this page can be left at the default settings until you're more comfortable with SleepyHead. Things of note for a newbie:.

Philips Respironics owners cannot access the clock, and may need to offset time drift. The best way to do this is to record your start-time, and reset the clock drift the next day using the CPAP Clock Drift. Time offsets may be positive advance time , or negative move time back.

If the starting time on the charts shows , the time would be moved back If you are using a different machine, this may be a useful option for you, but you will need to change the value for the Redline to reflect. See A detailed look at the Show Leak Redline option. Since our sample patient uses a Philips Respironics System One and she pretty much understands her leaks, she has unchecked the Redline so she doesn't get one in her daily leak graphs.

If you want a line for helping you spot Large Leaks and you are NOT using a ResMed S9 machine, the first thing you will need to do is figure out whether your machine's manufacturer has an official definition of "Large Leak" or not. Here is some information on that:. The Graphs tab of the Preferences panel contains a list of all potential graphs that SleepyHead can draw along with a minimum and maximum value for each graph.

The panel looks like this:. Note that there are going to be graphs on this list that do NOT show up in your particular data; that's because this is a master list of all the graphs for all the machines that SleepyHead supports.

If your machine does not record a particular kind of data, you won't have that graph show up in the daily data, even though it will be listed here. The "default" values where both the min and max values are set to 0.

Most of the time those default values are just fine. However, sometimes the the default values compress the data too much vertically and that can leave a lot of "unused white space" in the graphs. If you want to change a graph's values, double click on the particular value you want changed, and you'll be able to edit it: SleepyHead should save your graph settings after you've changed them, so you really only need to edit the y-values for the graphs once.

The values that make sense for our sample patient's data are probably NOT a good starting point for most people since she is a petite 5'1" female who weighs about lbs. That said, here's what the value she typically uses for her graphs look like:. The General tab of the Preferences panel looks like this:. The numerical average and weighted average are not a meaningful as Median is. Both the Average and Weighted Average can be seriously skewed by even a tiny bit of outlier data.

The default for "Skip over Empty Days" is to have the box checked; This patient wants to be reminded that there's no data for a particular day, so she unchecked that box. The default for "I want to try experimental and test builds" is to have the box unchecked. For a new user that's the right choice.

The Appearance tab of the Preferences panel looks like this: Some of these values have been edited. By default, the default values for the check boxes are:. For most users, the default settings can be left alone, with the following possible exceptions:.

All masks leak-- they all have an intentional leak rate built into their design to prevent re-breathing of CO2. This intentional, expected leak rate varies with the pressure level: As the pressure goes up, so does the intentional leak rate for the mask. The leak rate also varies from mask to mask. Typically full face masks have larger intentional leak rates than nasal masks or nasal pillows masks when used at the same pressure. Excessive leaking is when the total leak rate detected by the machine is larger than the intentional leak rate for the mask.

Excessive leaks are an ongoing issue for some CPAP users. A full understanding of the leak information reported by SleepyHead requires that you understand what kind of leaks your machine reports and how your machine's manufacturer defines Large Leak.

Total Leak Rate includes both the intentional leak rate built into your mask to prevent re-breathing of CO2 AND any excessive bad leaks.

ResMed machines record and report only the Excessive Leak. The S9 takes the raw total leak data and the mask setting and uses that to record the Excessive Leak data. SleepyHead uses Leak Rate to refer to only the excessive leak rate. The blower has to add at least 25 Liters of air to the system each minute in order to maintain the desired pressure.

The blower has to add at least 55 Liters of air to the system each minute in order to maintain the desired pressure. Modern CPAP machines are designed to gracefully cope with a certain amount of excessive leak by blowing additional air into the semi-closed system in order to preserve the desired pressure setting.

But even the best of machines cannot accommodate really large amounts of excess leak. When the excess leaking reaches the point where the machine's manufacturers are concerned that the machine will not be able to properly maintain the therapeutic pressure setting, the leak is defined to be a Large Leak.

Different manufacturers define and flag Large Leaks in different ways. ResMed, of course, must define Large Leak in terms of the excessive Leak Rate that is reported by their machines. Earlier versions of SleepyHead do not have this option. Lots of user data posted on the forum also indicates that the Large Leak line depends on the pressure used: People using less than 10 cm of pressure see Large Leaks being flagged much earlier than people using pressures greater than 10 cm.

Here are some general estimated guidelines for where the undefined Philips Respironics Large Leak line is located:. Official Large Leaks for Philips Respironics System One machines are very difficult to determine with great accuracy in versions of SleepyHead prior to 0. In version 0.

If you don't seem to have very many Official Large Leak, then use the above guidelines as a decent enough starting guess for where your particular Redline should be drawn.

In order to adversely affect the efficacy of your CPAP therapy and the accuracy of the data recorded by your machine, leaks have to be both large enough and long enough. As we've just seen, "Large enough" is easily quantified by the manufacturers. But what is "long enough"? ResMed is apparently the only major manufacturer that has a user-friendly tool for determining whether the official Large Leaks last long enough to compromise the CPAP therapy: The dreaded Mr.

Since the other manufacturers are "vague" when it comes to describing how long Large Leaks must last to adversely affect the CPAP therapy, we'll take that ResMed definition as a "working" definition:. So this may be a good rule of thumb for you to consider:. All that said: It's not uncommon for people to simply have a bad night for leaks every now and then.

If your leaks are usually decent enough, it can be counter-productive to worry about eliminating the last of the leaks. For ResMed users, that's easy to recognize: The Leak graph is a flat line at 0.

For all the rest of us, perfect leak lines are not quite so easy to recognize. We can use SleepyHead's estimated Leak graph rather than the Total Leak graph , but that may not always be accurate, particularly if we're using a bi-level or an auto machine with a wide range of pressures.

To identify a perfect leak line from Total Leaks requires a bit of knowledge: We need to know the expected intentional leak rate for the mask. The expected rate depends on both the mask and the pressure. The chart below shows the design flow rate at different pressures for a variety of masks and mask types:. But in an ideal world, you want your Total Leak graph to be pretty close to your expected leak rate.

We'd all like a perfect leak line every night. But for most of us, that's not going to happen. Moreover, the battle to eliminate all excess leaks may cause more problems than it fixes. So when are leak lines "good enough" to not worry about it?

In general a Total Leak line will be mostly "fuzzy" flat and stay mostly around the intentional leak rate for your mask and pressure, but tends to have some visible periods of noticeably higher leaks, most of which stay well below the cut off for "Large Leaks" for the given machine.

A few very short lived Large Leaks on an otherwise decent night are usually not something that you need to worry about. For ResMed users or for folks who simply want to concentrate on the excessive Leak data, a Good Leak line will be "fuzzy" flat, stay mostly around 0.

Here's an example of a "Decent Enough" leak line from our sample patient's own data:. But this rather large leak makes up only about 15 minutes out of 7 hours of run time; that's not enough time to really worry about. If you're trying out a new mask and you're still working out how to fit the mask, you may have one or more nights of really bad Large Leaks. If your mask cushion is starting to wear out, the first sign might be a higher than normal leak line.

If you wind up with a bad cold or the flu and you're seriously congested, you might be prone to doing more mouth breathing than normal and your leaks may be much higher than typical. So it's important to not over-react to one or a few bad nights with respect to leaks, particularly if there's an obvious explanation. There is some differences of opinion among long term CPAP users about how much time you have to spend in Large Leak territory before it becomes clear that you absolutely must do something about the leaks.

Some of this comfort: If the Large Leaks are waking you up, they've got to be dealt with. If you're not feeling better in the daytime, the Large Leaks might be part or all of the problem. ResMed is explicit about this line; the other manufacturers are more vague.

The run time for the night is about 8 hours. A lot of things can cause leaks of all sizes: Fiddling with the mask, jostling the mask to scratch your nose, jostling the mask while turning over in bed, mouth breathing, and facial relaxation facial sagging in deep sleep are all capable of causing both small and large leaks.

Worn out mask cushions, incorrectly sized masks, overtightened mask straps, and masks that are incorrectly reassembled can also cause leaks. Another potential cause of leaks are pressure increases when using a CPAP in auto mode.

Fitting a mask at low pressure tends to be easier than fitting a mask at higher pressures. And if you fit your mask at relatively low pressure, as the pressure increases, the pressure increase itself may cause the mask to lose its seal, and the result is an excessive leak. Mouth leaks can be particularly problematic for nasal mask and nasal pillows users. Indeed new CPAP users using nasal masks and nasal pillows are often told by other CPAP users that they need to use a full face mask if there is any chance that they might be a mouth breather.

And when a newbie posts pictures of problematic leak lines, the first thing that's often suggested is that the leaks are probably due to mouth breathing. But a leak is a leak no matter where it is coming from, and the machine doesn't know where it is coming from. So how do we determine if a leak is a mouth breathing leak or just a typical mask leak caused by something else?

Well, it's kind of difficult, but in general we look at the leak line on the graph. Short brief spiky leaks are very likely mask movement leaks Longer periods of spiky leaks may indicate that you were very restless and doing a lot of tossing and turning and repeatedly jostling the mask in the process.

Mouth-breathing leaks tend to have a longer period of leak and often tend to sort of create a a mesa or plateau effect. But facial relaxation can also lead to longer periods of leak that look like mesas or plateaus. The pattern easy enough to identify. Do we know with absolute certainty that this kind of a pattern is most likely a mouth breathing leak? Of course not but we can often make an educated guess.

Plateau type leaks combined with using a nasal mask interface and waking up with a dry mouth usually points to mouth leaks. Whether the mouth leaks are serious enough to warrant doing something about depends on their severity, both in terms of how large the leaks are and in how much they seem to disturb your sleep.

It's also important to point out again that two of the three probable periods of mouth breathing in that last example stay below the ResMed Redline: In terms of the efficacy of the CPAP therapy, the two smaller mouth breathing leaks are not serious enough to worry about.

This runs counter to the commonly accepted notion that you loose all your therapy pressure any time you open your mouth while using a nasal mask: The amount of air you lose through an open mouth depends on a lot of factors, most notably the placement of the tongue. And if you happen to open your mouth with your tongue in that spot, any mouth leaking may be very minimal as long as you are continuing to breath through your nose.

If you start breathing through your mouth, however, the tongue will slip from that position, and as the tongue moves down away from the roof of the mouth, more air will be able to leak out of the open mouth.

Many people do switch to full face masks because of suspected or known mouth breathing issues. In a full face mask, you can open and breathe through your mouth without losing pressure. Mouth breathing inside a FFM may still lead to serious dry mouth issues, however. But many people using FFM still have leak lines that have long plateau patterns reminiscent of mouth breathing.

And it is not uncommon for these long plateau leaks to be large enough to be scored as Official Large Leaks. Since mouth breathing is not the direct cause of such a leak when you are using a FFM, what is? The most likely cause is the relaxation of the facial and jaw muscles after the mouth has opened. As we sleep, these muscles relax and the facial tissue around the mouth and chin starts to sag. If the lower face sags or relaxes enough, the mask may pull away from the chin and create a potentially large leak.

It's also important to remember than FFM have a much larger footprint on the face, and hence there is more surface contact between the mask and the face, and that also can make it harder to seal a FFM in the first place. You only need to work on fixing the first two types of leaks. Small leaks which do not wake you up or lead to obvious restlessness can be ignored. Indeed, the efforts to try to eliminate the last of these small leaks may actually create problems in terms of overall comfort and your ability to get to sleep and stay asleep.

Long, large leaks need to be addressed because they affect your therapy, and ineffective CPAP therapy night after night will not allow you to feel at your best. If your leaks are frequently in Official Large Leak territory, you need to spend the time needed to figure out what's causing the leaks. Make sure your mask is the correct size and make sure you know how to correctly fit it at the beginning of the night: Overtightened headgear can cause serious leaks as can masks that are too large or too small for your face.

If the large leaks seem to be caused by significant mouth breathing or facial relaxation and you are using a nasal mask or a nasal pillows mask, you may need to consider a chinstrap, or taping your mouth, or switching to a full face mask. If you're already using a FFM and the problem is facial relaxation, a mask liner or a chinstrap may help.

Or you may need to add a special "anti-leak strap" for FFMs. But small leaks that irritate you or wake you up or keep you from getting back to sleep prevent you from getting a genuinely good night's sleep. So any leak that disturbs sleep is unwanted-- even if it is tiny. If your leaks stay below the Official Large Leak line for your machine and you seem to be sleeping soundly through them and your mouth is not too dry in the morning, you may very well decide to not do anything at all.

Some people aren't so lucky: It's clear that their leaks are either too large or too long or simply too annoying for them to get high quality sleep: If you are already super-sensitive to every little thing then you may need to take some extra measures to limit your leaks both big and small. You have to be able to sleep first and fragmented sleep for any reason will totally mess up sleep architecture and the normal sleep cycles and the time spent in each sleep stage.

If you wake up 20 times a night fiddling with leaks whatever the cause you are going to feel pretty bad the next day. Heck, if you wake up 20 times a night for any reason even reasons you can't point a finger at you are going to feel it the next day because if you remember a truckload of awakening, it's likely that you also had a fair number of awakenings that you don't remember also.

And fragmented sleep in general just kills the body's ability to make use of the normal restorative powers of sleep. And some people find themselves in the middle: Leaks sometimes seem to cause problems. Or perhaps certain types of leaks cause problems, but they can sleep through other types of leaks. If you find yourself in this situation, use some common sense when evaluating your leaks. How big of a problem is it really?

And is the cure more of a problem than the leak? Dry mouth may or may not mean that you are seriously impacting your therapy with mouth breathing. And if your mouth leaks seldom reach Official Large Leak territory, you have to weigh the potential discomfort of wearing a chinstrap, taping your mouth, or using a FFM against the potential problems caused by the non-Official Large Leak mouth leaks.

This is a personal call and has to be made on an individual level. Some people will be more comfortable having less leaks and more stuff on their face; others will be more comfortable sleeping with a few more leaks and a lot less stuff on their face.

As long as your leaks are not staying in Official Large Leak territory for excessive periods of time night after night, the best decision is the one that gives allows you to sleep most soundly with the fewest wakes. We've looked at how each manufacturer defines an Official Large Leak, we examined leak lines in order to figure out how to tell if leaks are a significant issue, and we've looked at some causes for leaks.

But we haven't actually looked at why Large Leaks cause problems for our CPAP machines and how those problems may affect our therapy.

When we use a CPAP, our upper airway is part of a "semi-closed pressurized system" comprising the blower, the tube, the mask, and our upper airway. The system is "semi-closed" because there is an intentional leak: The system is designed to intentionally lose air through the exhaust vents.

The desired pressure is maintained in the system by constantly supplying enough new air into the system to balance out the amount of air being lost through the leaks: Our CPAP must blow enough air into the "semi-closed pressurized system" to replace the air lost through the exhaust vents in the mask.

It may help to draw an analogy: We can think about the CPAP machine, hose, mask, and our upper airway as a leaky inner-tube with a tire pump attached to it. We can keep the inner-tube fully pressurized and inflated as long as we keep adding air to the tube by pumping as much air into the tube as is being lost through the leak.

But if we start losing more air through the leaks than we can pump in with the tire pump, the inner-tube loses pressure and starts to collapse. It's the same idea with our CPAP machines: As long as the excess leak rate is not too high, the CPAP machine has no real trouble blowing enough new air into the system to compensate for the total leak rate.

In other words, the CPAP can compensate for additional, moderate unexpected excess leaks by simply blowing more air into the system in order to maintain the same amount of pressurization.

But there are limits to how much air can be lost before the machine simply can't keep up with its job: Once the total leak rate crosses into official Large Leak territory, the CPAP will have trouble adding enough air to the system to balance out the air leaking out of the system.

And hence the machine will have trouble maintaining the desired pressure level. And that's the fundamental problem with Large Leaks: If they last for a long enough time, the machine may become unable to maintain a therapeutic pressure inside the upper airway.

SleepyHead gives more details in a bit of a messy, and overly detailed way , and DreamMapper isn't a very well thought-out or tested update to SleepMapper, sad to say.

Both software programs work fine. Depending on your general computer skills, you may want to get a knowledgeable friend help you set things up. Nothing is all that complicated -- unless you are using the Linux operating system. I do not use Apple Macintosh computers or Linux computers. You do need to insert your SD memory card into a card reader in your computer or have a card reader attached, usually thru a USB connection. Read the card with each program's "reader" component.

Note: As recommended, be sure to slide the lock on the SD card to the locked position BEFORE inserting in the computer, to ensure the information doesn't get damaged or erased by mistake. Good luck and best wishes!

Thanks for your suggestions. I just got all my questions on installation and SD card use answered this a. Now I just need to follow all the helpful advice on how to use SH!

Next step is to download the info to SH and try and learn how to interpret it! Since you have the same PR system as I do I will ask you!