Help understanding PR DreamMapper Info

[zonk]

Actually, I'm considering the dream machine but just waiting for SleepyHead to support it

[OpalRose]

pwgphoto,
I think your choice of machine is sound. The PR Xpaps are good solid machines. It's just that some will choose a machine by color and design and popularity. Take the AirSense 10 machines for example. They seem to be what most will go for, but if you read enough on this forum or any other, you will find many complaints about them.
Don't second guess yourself. Your DreamStation is delivering you good therapy.
Hang in there, I know it's frustrating not being able to get detailed data right now, but hoping that will change soon.

[OpalRose]

On my machine it says my 1 day 90% is 11, My 7 day is 10.9 and my 30 day is 10.9. I have only been using the machine five days now and the DME and Dr set it up to start at 4 and max at 11. I guess my prescription is for 11. I increased the start pressure to 5 because I felt like I wasn't getting enough air when starting out. The machine is an auto CPAP.

Thanks for the replies.

pwgphoto,
I wanted to get back to this post.
The AHI on your DreamDatation is the number you want to look at. You should be able to get that <5.
Your 90% pressure is at 11 or below for 90% of the night. The "or below" means you probably were not at 11 the whole night, but without pressure graphs to look at we don't know how low the number dips.

I think in order to fine tune and get your AHI down below 5, a starting pressure of
7 or 8 and a max pressure of 12 may work better for you.

[PaytonA]

I am assuming that you sleep at night. Check your machine and see if the clock is correct and check to see if you can adjust whether the new day starts at noon or midnight. Most CPAPs start the new day at noon of the following day to avoid having some of your sleep on one day and the rest on the next day. It occurred to me that your machine may not be picking up all of the time for each session which could explain the high AHI. The AHI from Dreammapper is mathematically correct. Might be a firmware bug in the machine. (Or maybe you have a split personality and the machine and software are picking up different sides of your personality ). Oh well....feeble attempt at humor.

Best Regards,

PaytonA

[pwgphoto]

Thanks everyone for all the advice, I really do appreciate it. I am sure it will get figured out one way or another. I did raise my minimum pressure from 4 to 7 a few days ago and it help me no feel like I was starved for air when I first start it. I don't really use the ramp since it is an auto machine and I imagine it starts on the lowest setting, in my case now a 7, anyway. Don't know why the machine does not display the same AHI as the DreamMapper App. Even today DreamMapper says AHI 3.7 and the machine display says 7.1 for the one day reading. I love the lower numbers, but hope they are correct. I guess I will have to wait until better software comes along or I can get the DME to explain it to me or fix the machine. I would love to hear from other DreamStation owners who use the app to see if they have the same problem.

[Sleepster]

Well the DreamStation seems to be the machine I got and I am not sure if there is any changing it at this point. So I guess you all are saying that my higher number of AHI on the machine is the true number I should pay attention to. I wonder if this is just my machine and the app not syncing the correct AHI or if it is all the DreamStations?

It's not the DreamStation, it's just the crappy app.

We're not raggin' on the DreamStation, we're raggin' on the company that makes it because of the software and the app they provide.

I used the predecessor to the DreamStation for over two years. Loved the machine, hated the software and the app.

Hopefully SleepyHead will soon work with the DreamStation. I for one will be making a major donation as soon as I see Mark writing code again. I need SH because the software for my machine (ResScan) is kinda crappy, too. Just not as bad as EncoreBasic. The real problem is that the commercial software is written for the medical providers, not the patients.

[zonk]

Session
A length of time in which therapy has been delivered with breaks lasting no more than one hour.

AHI - The device accumulates individual Apnea/Hypopnea indices (AHI) for each session the patient used the device. This screen displays the average of these individual nightly AHI values over a 7 day and 30 day time frame (provided the device has at least 7 or 30 days of data respectively). If the device has only 5 days of data to use for the calculation, the 5 day average value will be seen under the 7 day display.

can someone explain to me in a simple language what session and the first sentence of AHI mean

[Sleepster]

Session
A length of time in which therapy has been delivered with breaks lasting no more than one hour.

If you slept for two hours, had a midnight snack for 30 minutes, and then went back to sleep for another two hours, you'd have a session length of 4 hours.

But if your midnight snack lasts longer than an hour, you'd have two separate sessions, each with a session length of 2 hours.

AHI - The device accumulates individual Apnea/Hypopnea indices (AHI) for each session the patient used the device.

In the above example the AHI calculation would be based on 4 hours of use, and not include the time taken for the midnight snack.

[zonk]

Thanks, Sleepster
I like 'midnight snack' analogy, sometimes you've talk to people in their own language to understand

[Sleepster]

I was thinking today (yeah, I know, dangerous, right?) and came upon this idea.

So, pwgphoto told us this ...

OK I called the DreamMapper Support Line and [...] As far as the AHI number being different on the machine and the app, I was told that the machine is a per session AHI number and the app AHI is a total for the entire night.

I remember thinking that odd when I first saw it. Then Zonk quoted this passage presumably from a Respironics web page ...

Session
A length of time in which therapy has been delivered with breaks lasting no more than one hour.

AHI - The device accumulates individual Apnea/Hypopnea indices (AHI) for each session the patient used the device. [...]

Again, I thought it odd the way they talked about the AHI calculation being based on an accumulation of the time used. Like, duhh, is there any other meaningful way to do it? Why are they specifying such an obvious thing?

So, I'm thinking, maybe the rep that pwgphoto spoke to got it exactly backwards. Maybe the app reports the latest session AHI, but the machine "accumulates individual Apnea/Hypopnea indices (AHI) for each session the patient used the device" thus giving what everyone else thinks of as just the AHI.

Anyways, I dunno if I'm thinking about this right, but it explains like three different things that didn't makes sense to me before.