One of the keys to good health is a good night’s sleep, but many people suffer from sleep apnea and don’t even know it.
Sleep is one of the most overlooked health factors. Lack of quality sleep can lead to all sorts of complications, including high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes. One common cause is sleep apnea, in which your breathing is interrupted which in turn disrupts your sleep. The gold standard for diagnosis is to spend the night in a sleep clinic hooked up to wires under the watchful eye of a technician. This can be uncomfortable and inconvenient, which is part of the reason why many people don’t want to get tested. The pandemic lockdown has only made this worse. The VivoScore system uses a smart ring that pairs with an app on your smartphone and sends data about heart rate, pulse ox, and sleep apnea events to the cloud for processing and analysis. Trained physicians then screen the results and put the patient in touch with a dentist who will create a personalized oral device designed to keep breathing passages open during sleep. The result is a test that you can take while sleeping in your own bed, without having to travel to a sleep lab.