Torena, sleep position monitor for Android (similar to SomnoPose)

[NelsonM]

Has anyone tried "Torena - apnea sleep position trainer"? It's an Android app that "helps you track your sleep positions while sleeping and allows you to set an alarm for a specific sleep position". It sounds a lot like the iOS app SomnoPose which folks here have talked about: you strap your phone to your chest and sleep at night and get a report in the morning about when you were on your back, side, or stomach. Also has an alarm feature to alert you if you're in a position you want to avoid.

I haven't tried it yet. Mostly because I don't have the belt I need to strap my phone to my chest, also the silly psychology where you think twice about paying $10 for a mobile app. OTOH if it works it's totally worth the cost and setup hassle to me.

There's nothing in the app description or website that indicates OSCAR support. OTOH it does have a data export feature so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to get the data in to OSCAR one way or another.

FWIW I went looking long and hard for a position tracker for Android and this is all I came up with. I did find an interesting reference to a 2017 scientific paper (in German) that evaluated SomnoPose and a different Android app that found both that the trackers were accurate and that they were helpful in treating positional sleep apnea. The Android app they reference is called "Apnea Sleep Position Trainer" by a company called Con4m. That's no longer on the Google Play Store but I found references to it online. Looks like it's a discontinued app. Or maybe Torena is a continuation of it, not sure.

[Crimson Nape]

If you can find the Apnea Sleep Position Trainer APK file, it is a very simple installation on your phone.  Just download the APK file to your phone.  It will be placed in your Download directory.  Double tap on the filename, and it will install it on your phone. Since it isn't currently available, it may be free.

[NelsonM]

Yeah the older app is definitely acquirable if you're not too worried about the license niceties. But does it still work on a modern Android 11 phone? One major change Android made a couple of versions ago made it much harder for apps to run in the background continuously and I was worried it'd affect an older position tracker. I'd be glad to pay $10 just for some developer to have dealt with that for me.

I've ordered the belt now so I'll probably end up trying one or the other of these apps. Will report back. Still curious about anyone else's experience.

[Crimson Nape]

I would have used a section of an Ace bandage for the belt, but that is the cheapster in me. You could try it and if it doesn't work, uninstall it.

[NelsonM]

I've now tried Torena for about half an hour and got a feel for what it does. It's a good app, seemed to work when when I took a nap. It works a lot like I imagine Somnopose does; tracks the phone's orientation and uses that to detect which way you're lying down.

Now to figure out how to get the data from Torena in to OSCAR. I'm guessing making Torena's data export look like a Somnopose CSV is the easiest route. It looks like Torena's export is pre-analyzed. Somnopose writes a CSV with a bunch of rows with timestamps and orientation of the phone in degrees. Torena has that internally but what it exports in its JSON file is just a record of position changes. "On your back from 03:13:03 to 03:19:01". I can convert that back to raw orientations, albeit with a loss of fidelity. (Ironically the Torena debug log does have a record of exact orientation but that's not available for export.)

[Crimson Nape]

Is the log file located in the Torena directory on your Android?

[A KLERK]

I received a message from the Torena developer, saying:

I am a developer of the Android app Torena which tracks sleeping positions, and if desired, provides an alarm at a certain position (e.g. supine).
From one of my users I was asked if I could provide an export in a CSV format that can be read by Oscar, where I end up with CSV files that the iOS app Somnopose exports. Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

I invited him to come to this thread and also to think about collaboration... More to come!

[NelsonM]

Oh cool! That was me writing him about the OSCAR compatibility. My hacking project today is to take the data files that are currently available and get them in to OSCAR one way or another.

I like the app quite a bit. I used it all last night and got what looks like accurate data from it. I'll attach the graph you get from it in the app.

[A KLERK]

Small world
From your graph I guess that you get up from bed on the right hand side... 
Personally I would suggest the developer to change the order of the bars to (top-to-bottom):
Up - Right - Back - Left - Stomach

Just my two €-cents

[NelsonM]

Success! See the attached image for my OSCAR import. It works; Torena is totally viable for tracking sleep positions in OSCAR! Nice to have an Android alternative to Somnopose.

I wrote some Python code to do the conversion. It was pretty simple really. However I have not done the work to make this a useful tool for other folks to use, or even for myself to easily reuse. That's a lot more work. I think there's three ways to proceed:

1. Turn my convertor into a nice reusable program
   
2. Ask the Torena devs to export an OSCAR-compatible Somnopose CSV in the app
   
3. Design a new input format for OSCAR along with the Torena dev
   

I think the second option is simplest if the the Torena devs are willing. The third option could yield a really nice result for OSCAR but it requires thinking through some questions about OSCAR as a product. For instance it'd be nice to have a more intuitive presentation than numbers from -180 to 180. That's what Somnopose outputs and it's great to have the data in OSCAR at all, but I'm already imagining something better.

(I have some more detailed notes on my blog.)