Sleep Europe 2026 | Multinight home monitoring in OSA: night-to-night variability, climate and ‘social apnea’

This new technology is really complementing what we do with single night testing. We know from a variety of studies now that testing for sleep apnea in just one night is going to result in diagnostic inaccuracy 20 to 50% of the time. So to put that in perspective, if you come back from a single night sleep study with a diagnosis of mild sleep apnea, for you to repeat that test, it’s a 50% chance it’ll come back in a different category, either no sleep apnea at all or a different severity level. So they’re pretty alarming statistics for our current tests. And what we can do to add value with these multi-night sort of zero burden testing equipment in the home is to see what’s going on in the real world so it can take away some of the issues that some people have from sleeping in the lab and with all the equipment to get a better picture of what’s going on in the real world in the home and it can help us sort out some of those cases of diagnostic uncertainty as well as reveal new clinical information, things like the variability from night to night in sleep apnea that we’re finding is really associated with cardiovascular outcomes, such as hypertension, independent of how severe people’s sleep apnea is. So these serve to not only provide complementary, but additional new insight and deal with some of that diagnostic inaccuracy. What we’re seeing at a global level is we pair these stats. So remembering that typically we’ve only had a one night snapshot into people’s sleep via polysomnography, whether that was done in the home or the lab, but that diagnosis typically sticks with them for life. And that’s really important because because we can now so there is a lot of information from these high-level signals with rich neurophysiological information we can now track health outcomes six years down the track from a single night sleep study. There’s lots of rich information there but now by pairing it with different data systems and different health outcomes, we can see things like the effect of climate change that’s happening on people’s sleep. So heat waves disrupt people’s sleep timing, their quality. It also makes your breathing worse throughout the night. And neurologically, that can lead to sort of neurocognitive impairment, more likely to crash your car the next day and these kind of consequences. That’s just one example. We see seasonal variation across the globe. We recently coined this term social apnea because using this technology, we saw lots more sleep apnea on the weekend than we do during the week. And there’s a variety of reasons for that including those social aspects of probably drinking more, not using your therapy as much, later bedtimes, sleeping against your circadian rhythm, all these factors and then of course these relationships with cardiovascular outcomes that we’re seeing from these multi-night recordings.

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