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Luno - Future of Sleep Apnea Therapy

Degree Project 2021

Sleep is fundamental for our well-being. Unfortunately, various sleep disorders can disturb this crucial activity and impact overall health, safety, and life quality. Obstructive sleep apnea is a common sleep disorder, affecting between 2-9% of adults. It impacts a person's ability to breathe during sleep and, thus, entirely prevents from taking a rest at night, but it also overburdens the body. Untreated, it leads to cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, depression, or stroke.

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The most common and successful therapy is sleeping with a continuous positive airway pressure machine - CPAP therapy. Although it maintains airflow to the lungs, the experience of wearing a mask connected with a tube to the loud devices every night is challenging. It takes around 50% of users to drop the treatment despite all the health consequences. However, adherence to the therapy is not the only challenge that patients are facing. Most of them are advised to change their lifestyle and decrease the body mass. It gives some of them a chance to decreases their sleep apnea and prevents it from beginning a lifelong disorder. Moreover, most patients have cardiovascular diseases connected with sleep apnea and require monitoring and undisturbed use of CPAP therapy.

With medicine and technology limitations CPAP will maintain the most used therapy for at least the next few years. So how can those devices better support patients? After interviewing patients, doctors, therapist and experts from Philips, the questions were raised: What if CPAP therapy not only helps patients get a good night's sleep but also helps them tackle the sleep apnea disorder with its all consequences to their health? Also, what's the behaviour and appearance of the medical device for the home environment that is a night companion?

This is Luno.

Luno is a product system that helps patients manage obstructive sleep apnea by monitoring their health and providing accurate guidance and support. It applies a holistic approach in therapy that includes: breathing support at night, struggles with adherence, tackling crucial factors such as weight and lifestyle, and monitoring cardiovascular system diseases linked with sleep apnea.

The system consists of a CPAP device, sensor, and interface. CPAP device helps patients get a good night's sleep despite sleep apnea and monitors their disorder. The sensor collects data about users' cardiovascular health and sleep. Combined, it provides a full picture of users' health and their needs. With TAMI (Technology Assisted Motivational Interviewing) - scientifically proven tool, the interface uses the data to guide and support the patient as a smart assistant. The project aimed to challenge the competencies of the CPAP device, the way it interacts with the user, and its medical appearance that doesn't match the home environment.

Luno, a smart sleep apnea assistant in a journey to improve health.