Are you struggling with keeping your mask on? MASK REMOVAL ALARM

[charstrauss]

Hi there,
I’m a thirty-year-old guy with severe sleep apnea. Though I (of course) wish I could get treated I’ve been having a ton of trouble because I couldn't find a mask that fits well. Now I have a good mask (Airfit P10), but unfortunately, along the way, I developed a habit of taking my mask off many times during the night which has made compliance really hard. I looked around but it seems like there’s not any good option for this, just a machine with a baked in alarm (that I don’t want to buy}. Everyone just told me it would go away eventually.

It hasn’t, but fortunately, I have an awesome friend who is a really handy engineer. He helped me to make a basic alarm that wakes me up every time I take off the mask. It works by measuring the airflow in the tube and it’s hooked up to a little box that sits on your bedside and makes the alarm tone. I’ve used it every night for about a month and it helps a lot, although my sleep still isn’t totally better. I still take my mask off around 4-5 times a night, but because of the alarm now I wake up and put it back on.

After we made this thing, we realized that there might be a lot of people who could benefit from an alarm like this.

So I have two questions:
1. can anyone tell me how common this problem is?
2. would anyone be interested in trying a prototype of this alarm?