The Button Box

I've begun the collection of a variety of factors that chronicle my response time, how I feel, nutritional factors, exercise, stress at home and work, medications I take, APAP settings, sleep environment, blood pressure, Zeo sleep scores, etc.  To do this, I have created a "button box" that I can click an appropriate button and record these things.  It's not a real flexible application suitable for others, but it does the job OK for me.  I think I have most of the factors I would like to capture and I may add more as I go forward.  The most important is how I feel and so I have buttons for overall goodness (1-10), groggy, achy, headache, puffiness, arrhythmias.

When I click a button, depending on the nature of what I'm recording, different things happen.  For response time, I am asked when I woke up and how long it takes to set a time control is logged.  Then a "whack-a-mole" type of little game appears where I have to click on a image which then randomly moves to another position on the screen.  It moves 10 times.  The average time between the image appearing and when it gets clicked is recorded.  This actually seems to capture my hand-eye coordination skills fairly well. For exercise, it asks for the start time, duration and the average heart rate (a proxy for exertion).  For single dose things, like taking an Excedrin (aspirin / acetaminophen), it just records a "1" in the Excedrin variable.  Some factors ask for a judgment on a scale of 1-10.  All entries are time stamped so I can later compute their timing, inter-relationships through time, etc. If I look at them as being before a sleep they potentially could then be a causal factor, or perhaps look at them as coming after sleep, making them a potential a consequence of good or poor sleep.

What am I going to do with this data?  A lot!  That will be the fuel for a lot of future topics.

Greatest challenge: The discipline to use it.  When I do something, I need to click

Current Status

Presently we are working on getting the ResMed data into our data analysis tools.  After that is successfully complete, then a software mechanism for entering and tracking various factors at various parts of the day and night that are suspected to influence sleep quality and "how do I feel".  After that, some experiments, which will be very interesting.

The identification of the various "controllable factors" and metrics on quality and "feel" is an ongoing identification process and probably will be for quite a while. There's at least 20 factors (so far, there are more I know) that are in my control that may have an effect and a dozen metrics that can be created that test and measure my performance during various parts of the day.  More on this later.  A lot more.  Stay tuned...

Major Shifts

I've been on Auto Positive Airway Pressure (APAP) therapy since November 14th, 2011.  In the beginning I resigned myself to sleep on my back because I had a full face mask.  I gave it a go for a few weeks.  Results: Better than my sleep study, but generally not real good. I had an AHI averaging about 5 and a one-day peak at 12 and I started getting a lot of "Central Apneas". Now, real Centrals are a problem, because your brain is not telling your lungs to move, and um, ah, that's kind of important.  But in my case I think they were false centrals, more of an artifact of struggling and the ResMed S9 Autoset may score things in its own way.  I called the Dr. anyway and they wanted to increase my pressure to resolve the high AHI score.  I did, for about 45 minutes.  I was over blown and could not tolerate it.  What to do?  My sleep study said I did better on my stomach, I've always been a tummy sleeper (now I know why) and so I found a way to sleep with a full face mask and switched to my tummy.  Wa-La! You can see the big step down in "AHI" in the middle of the chart.

Next, I'm a rather odd duck, I live in multiple places. In the latter part of the above chart, I switched from a home with humidity control and a big bed, to an apartment w/o humidity control and sleep on a smaller bed.  Hummm... you can see the difference by eye.  What factors are at play here, I'm not sure; humidity, bed comfort, apartment living with a bit more distractions, changes in diet, experimenting with the effects of alcohol, or what?

Just a curiosity is all, and a clue to ponder.