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

[A KLERK]

Well done! You could write a PM to Gideon (the project leader) to contribute to OSCAR's development... Even together with the Torena guy who wrote to me!
I think this is of great value for the few people out there who don't have an iPhone

[NelsonM]

Good news! Torena now exports data for OSCAR.

With help from our forum the Torena developer has updated his app so it exports data in Somnopose CSV format, which OSCAR already understands.  Record a sleep session, then from the statistics page click the little downward pointing arrow. Choose Somnopose CSV and a "Share" dialog pops up. Send the file to yourself however you can (I use Gmail) and then you can import it into OSCAR.

The result looks like this

   

So now we Android users have an easy-to-try position sensor app too! (Did you know Android has 73% market share in the world? 46% in the US.)

That's all the work I'm going to do on this for now. I have some ideas about more things to do with position data but I'm not motivated enough to see them through. The biggest problem to solve is aligning the clocks between OSCAR and imported data. That's a problem for all imports, not just Torena.

[TorenaAndroid]

Hello,

I'm the developer from the Torena app on Android 
Arie hinted me to post a comment here so I could bring more context on why I decided to develop the app..

I received the diagnosis back in December 2019 as a light form of apnea, according to the hospital not position related. I requested a sleep study myself after years of complaints and feeling I had only slept like 5 hours while I was in bed for 8-9 hours (and not really waking up or remembering it, or toilet visits or anything, but I did have a dry throat at times)

I decided to put effort into a strong diet, and lost around 16 kilos (35 pounds) in 4 months, just by focussing on healthy food. I already did sports before the diagnosis, and went a level further with that as well (during summer around 200km/125 miles on my bike per week, and throughout the year around 50km/30 miles running per week)
Because I was suspecting a combination of causes for my apnea diagnosis, I started some investigations myself. My bedroom is next to a busy main road, even at night. So I started putting in earplugs at night. I also noticed that when I woke up consiously, I was lying on my back most of the times (I start sleeping on my right side). So I started sleeping with a big pillow behind my back, and I learnt it improved my sleeping. That's why I started thinking my apnea diagnosis was partly position related, even when they said in the hospital it was not. But during my sleep study I had the machinery on my back, because at the time I started sleeping on my belly (which I taught myself not to do anymore, and switched to right side)

So I wanted to know if I really slept a lot on my back. The options for apps on the Android market are limited, only a few outdated apps which didn't work very well (alarm settings did not work for the app I tried back then). The alternative is Night Balance by Philips, but that product was just bought from TU Delft (I believe) and taken out of the market temporarily. Also very expensive if you don't know if the apnea is position related, and healthcare does not (or did not at the time) reimburse it in Belgium.

The way the Android apps worked was also very outdated, so as a professional IT developer I thought I could do better. That way I could also build it to my own needs, and have a first experience with Android development. And so Torena was born. I've tried it myself first for a couple of months, and the results were good. I learnt that I did sleep on my back a lot (3-4 hours on an 8 hour sleep), and if I set the alarms in the app (sound alarm works best for me, I don't easily wake up from the vibration alarm) I could limit sleeping on my back to 15-20 minutes. I do wake up when the sound alarm goes off, but I just turn on my side, and fall back to sleep in no time (the alarm stops automatically when moving away from back position). Result: a far bettter night rest, and much less feeling I slept too short (so even when waking up because of the alarm).

Then I decided to offer the app in Google Play Store, for a small price to compensate the effort and time I've put into it, and because I would pay that amount knowing what results it brings to me. Also to explore how publishing paid apps in Google Play Store works, so mainly one big exploration trip into the world of apps for me, in which I had no experience.

In January 2020, I did a second sleep study, suggested by the doctors at the hospital after hearing my story and experiences, so I could put the pure numbers next to the results from my first sleep study in 2019. That's how I could check if the improvements were just a feeling, or a fact proven by numbers.
I also used the Torena app that night, and then put the results next to the results from the hospital. Those proved to be a nearly exact match. Only the moments I slept in between positions (eg not on my back, but not on my side either) had some differences, because both Torena and the camera at the hospital will do a best guess to determine if it's back or side. Torena does this based on device orientation, which can be configured in the app, the camera at the hospital does this based on the video image. So it's never a certain result, and I trust the Torena app more on that part, since you can set each position easily in the app by setting degrees on a 360 degree circle. The doctors at the hospital were pleasantly surprised by the results I could get out of the app. Also saying they could not officially/actively recommend it to patients, because it lacks scientific grounds at the moment.

My sleep study result in 2020 was amazing, almost no apnea events recorded, and almost no back positions detected. So I was declared "cured" from apnea. According to the doctores because of a combination of things I did: losing weight, increasing sports, use a different position to start sleeping (from belly to side), better sleep habits (going to bed at more fixed times), using earplugs to block out noise (stopped doing that end of 2020, and still no problems with it), and the Torena app which helps me to avoid back position during sleep.

So for me more than a succesful journey, and also at the hospital they were very happy to see a patient walk a different path instead of taking the road to CPAP devices, and working actively on a healthier life, not just accepting the diagnosis and standard treatment like that. I was also pushed towards sleeping with a CPAP device, but I really did not want to go down that road. I hope the Torena app can find its way towards other apnea patients who want to follow up on their sleep positions, and try if avoiding back position can help them, even in combination with other treatments or devices.

I never heard of OSCAR until I received the request from NelsonM, because I never took a deep dive into apnea treatments using CPAP (also because I still don't have much sleep troubles up to this date). To me it's not very intuitive software, but I didn't use it much either. Probably for users using CPAP devices it's easier to use, the graphs I got out of OSCAR looked very similar to the ones I saw at the hospital.

I hope to have given a better context and background around why Torena was made 

If someone wants to build an integration into OSCAR for Torena, or if someone has ideas to improve the Torena app, I'm willing to provide support and look how I can add suggestions into the Torena app. I'm not adding the integration myself because I'm not confident on my C++ knowledge. That is also the reason why I opted to build an export feature towards SomnoPose CSV format, so users can still import the Torena data into OSCAR that way.

If any questions or suggestions, I'm happy to hear them.
I'm leaving on holiday in a few days, so a reply can take some time 

Grts,
Kurt

[NelsonM]

Welcome to the forum and thanks for sharing your story! And thanks for Torena! It's been very helpful to me.