Withings Sleep Rx: Allowing Sleep Specialists to Make House Calls

Up to 30% of adults experience intermittent or chronic insomnia; 20% suffer from sleep apnea, although up to 80% of them are unaware and undiagnosed.1 Poor sleep and sleep disorders like Obstructive Sleep Apnea, have been linked to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, dementia, cardiovascular mortality, seizures, stroke, congestive heart failure, lowered immune response, and impaired judgment and reaction times. With such widespread prevalence and dire consequences, the theme of World Sleep Day 2025: MAKE SLEEP HEALTH A PRIORITY is an imperative. Polysomnography, either in a lab or at home, is the clinical gold standard for measuring sleep health, but these studies can be expensive, inaccessible and difficult to schedule. They are usually single-night observations which rely on human interpretation of data and do not capture variability in sleep quality over multiple nights. Withings Sleep Rx is a discreet mat placed under the mattress which captures many of the same metrics as polysomnography with longitudinal, contact free monitoring in a real-world setting. Sleep Rx is the first contactless, in-home sensor to aid in diagnosing Obstructive Sleep Apnea. This is measured and scored using the Withings Index. The Withings Index uses heart rate and breathing inputs (both sound and variations of pressure in the bladder) to calculate an estimated frequency of adverse breathing events per hour during the night. Clinical validation of the Withings sleep mat shows good agreement with polysomnography-derived Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI) with high predictive performance (88% sensitivity and 88% specificity) to classify moderate to severe OSA .2Sleep Rx continuously tracks heart rate with ballistocardiographygraphy (BCG) using a pneumatic sensor that measures the mechanical wave that each heart beat sends through the body. BCG has been validated against ECG and found to be highly accurate .3 Variability in heart rate can be used to detect sleep phases .4 Nocturnal heart rate is comparable to resting heart rate and is a good indicator of overall cardiovascular health 5.The Withings sleep mat also incorporates a snoring algorithm which crosses breathing rate and audio signals to identify snoring patterns and differentiate them from environmental noises or a partner’s snoring. The algorithm has been shown to be 94.4% precise with a 75.9% recall 6.In addition, the sleep mat analyzes movement, interruptions, sleep onset latency, duration, regularity, and efficiency. With a one-time set up, the mat automatically syncs data via WiFi with the HIPAA-compliant Withings API and integrates with the Withings Remote Patient Monitoring platform. Sleep Rx is available by prescription in the US.The ease of use of Sleep Rx combined with its sophisticated and robust metrics make it an ideal tool for capturing sleep variability over multiple nights. This cutting edge technology presents exciting clinical research applications, opportunities to optimize treatment adherence, and the ability to enhance the precision of personalized sleep medicine.ReferencesYoung T, Evans L, Finn L, Palta M. Estimation of the clinically diagnosed proportion of sleep apnea syndrome in middle-aged men and women. Sleep. 1997 Sep, 20(9):705-6. Lechat B, Naik G, Reynolds A, Aishah A, Scott H, Loffler KA, Vakulin A, Escourrou P, McEvoy RD, Adams RJ, Catcheside PG, Eckert DJ. Multinight Prevalence, Variability, and Diagnostic Misclassification of Obstructive Sleep Apnea. Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2022 Mar 1;205(5):563-569. doi: 10.1164/rccm.202107-1761OC. PMID: 34904935; PMCID: PMC8906484.Brüser, K. S. Christoph. Adaptive beat-to-beat heart rate estima- tion in ballistocardiograms. IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. Biomed. Publ. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Soc. 2011, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 778–86.Redmond, P. de C. S. J. Sleep staging using cardiorespiratory signals. Somnologie – Schlafforschung Schlafmed. 2007, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 245–256.Kim Fox, Jeffrey S. Borer, A. John Camm, Nicolas Danchin, Rober- to Ferrari, Jose L. Lope. Resting heart rate in cardiovascular disease. JACC. August 2007, vol. 50, Issue 9.Norman RG, Pal I, Stewart C, Walsleben JA, Rapoport DM. Inte-robserver agreement among sleep scorers from different centers in a large dataset. Sleep. 01 Nov 2000, vol. 23(7):901-908. Interested in partnering with us? Contact Us