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. 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, impaired judgment and reaction times. With such widespread prevalence and dire consequences, the theme of World Sleep Day 2025 arrives with a clear directive: Make Sleep Health a Priority.
Why Sleep Rx
Polysomnography, whether 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're also usually single-night observations, relying on human interpretation of data and missing variability in sleep quality across multiple nights.
Sleep Rx is a discreet mat placed under the mattress that captures many of the same metrics as polysomnography, with longitudinal, contact-free monitoring in a real-world setting. It's the first contactless, in-home sensor to aid in diagnosing Obstructive Sleep Apnea.
How it works
OSA severity is measured and scored using the Withings Index, which uses heart rate and breathing inputs, both sound and pressure variations detected by the mat's pneumatic sensor, to calculate an estimated frequency of adverse breathing events per hour during the night. Clinical validation shows good agreement with polysomnography-derived Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI), with high predictive performance (88% sensitivity and 88% specificity) for classifying moderate to severe OSA.²
Sleep Rx continuously tracks heart rate using ballistocardiography (BCG), via a pneumatic sensor that measures the mechanical wave each heartbeat sends through the body. BCG has been validated against ECG and found to be highly accurate.³ Heart rate variability can be used to detect sleep phases,⁴ and nocturnal heart rate, comparable to resting heart rate, is a good indicator of overall cardiovascular health.⁵
The sleep mat also incorporates a snoring algorithm that cross-references breathing rate and audio signals to identify snoring patterns and differentiate them from environmental noise or a partner's snoring. The algorithm has been shown to be 94.4% precise, with 75.9% recall.⁶ It also analyzes movement, interruptions, sleep onset latency, duration, regularity, and efficiency.
With a one-time setup, 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, makes it an ideal tool for capturing sleep variability over multiple nights. This technology presents exciting clinical research applications, opportunities to optimize treatment adherence, and the ability to enhance the precision of personalized sleep medicine.
References
- Young 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, et al. 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
- Brüser C, Stadlthanner K, de Waele S, Leonhardt S. Adaptive beat-to-beat heart rate estimation in ballistocardiograms. IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed. 2011;15(5):778-786.
- Redmond SJ, de Chazal P. Sleep staging using cardiorespiratory signals. Somnologie – Schlafforschung Schlafmed. 2007;11(4):245-256.
- Fox K, Borer JS, Camm AJ, et al. Resting heart rate in cardiovascular disease. JACC. 2007 Aug;50(9).
- Norman RG, Pal I, Stewart C, Walsleben JA, Rapoport DM. Interobserver agreement among sleep scorers from different centers in a large dataset. Sleep. 2000 Nov 1;23(7):901-908.