​Withings Sleep Analyzer launches to fight sleep apnea

Withings has launched the Withings Sleep Analyzer, a sleep sensing mat designed to gather deep insights into your slumber.

An upgrade to Withings Sleep that launched back in 2019, Sleep Analyzer is a mat that slips under the mattress and uses pneumatic sensors to monitor breathing rate, body movement and heart rate to track the cycles and stages of your sleep.

However, it now uses a microphone to track snoring, and will provide data on that as well.

While all this is useful data for sleep tracking, which is analysed and presented in the Withings Health Mate app, its sleep apnea detection has now been validated through a clinical study with Hôpital Antoine Béclère in France and Hôpital St-Pierre in Belgium.

Withings Sleep Analyzer

Sleep apnea has been a focus of the wearables industry over the last few years, with Fitbit paying particular attention, using SpO2 sensors to measure the oxygen in the blood. Withings has taken a different tact here, looking for other signs including snoring and breathing rates – and their results closely map to the accuracy of Polysomnography (PSG) analysis used in sleep labs.

Sleep apnea affects 175 million Europeans, according to research, and 8 in 10 people don’t know they suffer with the condition.

Sleep apnea tech has been notoriously difficult to get validated, especially in the US where the FDA rarely grants certification to consumer tech. Thus Fitbit’s Estimated Oxygen Variation feature took years to launch on devices, and does not use sleep apnea terminology in the presentation of the data.

The Withings Sleep Analyzer has received medical device marking from the CE for use in Europe and the UK – but crucially will not yet be offered in the US.

That’s the same situation as the Withings Move ECG, which has yet to launch outside of Europe, and is delaying the launch of the Withings ScanWatch, which has yet to be given a formal release date after being launched at CES 2020.

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