For physicians
About the summary your patient may bring
Nefesly is an app some of your patients use that summarises the night from a phone, a smartwatch and a ring. The phone listens to sound, the watch measures heart rate and movement, and the ring measures blood oxygen. This page briefly explains what the summary they may bring you shows, and what it does not.
Nefesly records snoring and breathing sound patterns with your phone's microphone while you sleep; if you wear a smartwatch or ring, it also reads what they measure and shows it all to you as a summary. It is not a medical device; it does not diagnose, monitor or treat any disease and does not replace a doctor's examination.
What the summary contains
- The recording time and quality of the night: if the phone could not hear well enough, the night is marked "could not be assessed".
- Where snoring was concentrated during the night (timeline).
- Intervals in which the breathing sound fell markedly. These are not the same as events on polysomnography; the summary gives no AHI or risk score.
- The patient's evening notes (alcohol, late meals, illness) and, if you want to listen, short marked audio clips.
Known limitations
- Airflow and breathing effort are not measured. Oxygen and sleep stage appear in the summary only if the patient wore the ring and the watch that night.
- Sleep stages from the watch are approximate compared with polysomnography.
- With the phone on the bedside table, most reductions in breathing on nights of mild severity may be missed.
- In a shared bed, a single phone cannot tell who is snoring.
- Method and validation: Method.
Pages you can give your patient
We wrote these in plain language for patients and their families who want to reread at home what was explained in the consultation. On each page, clinical detail sits in a separate "For experts" section; the plain text uses no jargon.
- When to see a doctor? A list of signs compiled from the symptoms in guidelines; it gives no score and can be printed.
- The night of a sleep test: how laboratory and home tests go, and a preparation list.
- The first weeks with CPAP: mask types, problems in the first days, adherence.
- Sleep glossary: plain-language meanings and formal definitions of the terms in reports.
- Listen: clips of snoring, hypopnea and apnea from the PSG-Audio dataset, with expert scoring.
Guidelines and method
- Guidelines and reviews: the guidelines we refer to for diagnosis, PAP therapy, scoring and insomnia.
- Research summaries: each summary gives the study type, the level of evidence and the limitations stated by the authors.
- Method: data, blind labelling and validation results measured in a research setting. These results are not diagnostic accuracy.
Sources
Plain summaries of the peer-reviewed studies we searched for each function of the app are in the Science section. A meta-analysis of phone-based sleep screening reports that specificity stayed lower in methods relying on sound alone (Kim et al., PLOS ONE 2022; doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0268585).
For comments and corrections: support@nefesly.com. This page is not a promotion of a health institution or physician.