I've been using ResMed the past five years or so and it definitely has helped. I started with a CPAP but later switched to a BiPAP.
Here are some things I've learned.
1. The "Apnea Board" is just like FReeRepublic -- lots of people helping each other and discussing sleep apnea, machines, therapies, interpretation of data, etc. I highly recommend the board. The people there will help you tweak your machine settings to get the most out of it. There are thousands of discussion threads and all very well organized. To give you an idea, here are the recent topics on the page sidebar right now:
Recent Forum Topics
- OSCAR Data - High AHI low leak
- What can you do after a fire?
- Advice on pressure adjustments
- Phillips update.
- Liz's CPAP therapy
- Intermittent "mooing" noises from (new) machine
- Looking for advice on my sleep test results
There's a great Your Personal CPAP Success Story with 1,362 replies. People discuss their experiences like on this thread.
2. At the Apnea Board, I learned about fantastic free software called "OSCAR" ("Open Source CPAP Analysis Reporter"). You put an SD Card in your CPAP machine and periodically take it out and plug it into a card reader attached to your computer. You open OSCAR and import the data. It shows you ALL the details and numbers of your sleep, minute-by-minute all night long, WAY beyond a simple AHI index (which is included, too). Be sure to eject the card from your PC or Mac and put it back into your CPAP machine.
3. There are wearable Pulse-Oximeters you can wear overnight and the data can be imported into OSCAR. You then see your blood oxygen levels aligned with all of your sleep data on the charts. I like the idea that you can directly measure your blood oxygen and pulse all night long -- after all, that's what this is all about, right? I use a Chinese product called the "O2 Ring." It's available on Amazon. They provide their own software "O2 Insight Pro" that provides a summary Sleep Report with graphs of your O2 and pulse overnight. It's the same data that gets imported to OSCAR. You can download the Sleep Reports as pdfs or as txt data. If you are inclined and comfortable programming, you can do all sorts of analytics on your data over time.
