OSA is a commonly seen sleep disorder with life-threatening consequences. Still, we see its high undiagnosed rate due to the not-so-friendly screening environment: many wires connecting to the patients’ bodies and sleeping in an unfamiliar bedroom, a sleep laboratory, and charging at a high rate. All of these create a high barrier to the mass, whose perception is “OSA would wait” without realizing the damage to their hearts and brains in the long run. Instead, Belun focused on developing a handy wearable so that the public would do the test at home, on their own, with no technician required.
Convenience is what we need nowadays. Technology can bring treatment accessibility to the mass, which we see as a way out for our worldwide ageing population and long-term chronic disease management. OSA is highly related to many of them. It also significantly saves government healthcare expenditures if we adopt preventive healthcare now. Belun embarks on this new company direction in “Preventive Healthcare Solutions” based on the health fingerprints collected in our six-year journey, which become a solid foundation of our AI algorithms.
The AI would predict risk to warn the individuals when detecting abnormalities before the situation worsens, thus minimizing health risk. In addition, Belun creates medical-grade wearables & solutions for screening sleep health, evaluating treatment effectiveness for chronic disease patients & predict health risks.
Do Wearables and AI shed light on OSA and sleep architecture?
Wearables have become more and more popular in sleep monitoring. Consumer utilization of sleep devices and apps is soaring. Combining the physiological data acquired by medical-grade wearables during sleep and AI, screening OSA at home has become feasible. Compared with manually scored polysomnography, the gold standard for diagnosing OSA, the award-winning Belun® Ring‘s accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the apnea-hyponea index (AHI) and sleep stages from clinically validated technologies is as high as 85%.
Award-winning Belun® Ring is an FDA 510(k) cleared Class II device that uncovers sleep architecture. For the individual consumer, we provide health trends shown in the mobile apps that offer knowledge about personalized sleep stages, empowering the individual to self-manage health by improving habits that make their rest more productive, which means better recovery. See our products and services.
Growing interest among the dental community in OSA screening
Since the American Dental Association issued a policy statement that addressed the dentist’s role in assessing patients’ risk for sleep-related breathing disorders in 2017, we see growing interest from the dental community in exploring OSA screening in their practices with Belun® Ring. In addition, we have programmes to cater to the dental practice; contact us for more information. (email to Jay) Recent youtube program with dentist in Hong Kong sharing how Belun® Ring help expand their practice to sleep health, thus retaining clients with more personalized services (photo of Dentist / Doctor assessing patient)
FDA-cleared Belun Ring & clinically-validated AI sleep platform
Belun provides Sleep Test services through an evidence-based Sleep Health Platform. Our machine learning analysis has generated over 15,000+ sleep reports from 160M+ data segments worldwide. Moreover, it is a comfortable measurement with an FDA approved, small, lightweight, cableless, and ergonomically designed ring. It is a cost-effective test conducted at home for multiple nights and without the hassles of staying in the hospital sleep lab overnight (usually only one night). With the proprietary AI algorithm for sleep analysis, it is fast and accurate with high sensitivity (0.85) and specificity (0.87) of Belun Ring-AHI (bAHI)≥ 15 in predicting PSG-AHI≥ 15 as well as significant correlations with PSG in both total sleep time (TST) and AHI.
Global research collaborations contributing to big data of chronic disease management
Belun is currently in collaborations with different universities studying the relationship of OSA with multiple chronic diseases such as stroke, hypertension, dementia, cardiovascular disease… If you are in a similar research area, please get in touch with us to co-create the history of chronic disease management.
Partnering with Belun :
Up to now, over a hundred organizations, including HK hospital authority hospitals, medical groups, clinic groups, dentists, and elderly centers selected to use the Belun Sleep System, Belun® Ring and Sleep App, and Belun® remoVital monitoring system. Many doctors read our medical journal papers, including:
1) “Belun® Ring Platform: a novel home sleep apnea testing system for assessment of obstructive sleep apnea” (https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8592),
2) “Detection of obstructive sleep apnea using Belun Sleep Platform wearable with neural network based algorithm and its combined use with STOP-Bang questionnaire” (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0258040),
3)Belun® Ring (Belun Sleep System BLS-100): Deep Learning-Facilitated Wearable Enables OSA Detection, Apnea Severity Categorization, and Sleep Stage Classification in Patients Suspected of OSA (https://journals.lww.com/jhypertension/Abstract/2023/06000/The_Belun_sleep_platform_to_diagnose_obstructive.16.aspx),
4) Correlation of Pulse Rate Variability(PRV) and Heart Rate Variability(HRV) Metrics During Sleep in Subjects Suspected of OSA (Accepted in SLEEP conference 2023, Abstract ID: 954).
If you would like to know more about how to adopt Belun’s solution in your organization or home use, please feel free to contact us to schedule a meeting by filling out the form below:
References
- Kwon S, Kim H, Yeo WH. Recent advances in wearable sensors and portable electronics for sleep monitoring. iScience. 2021 Apr 21;24(5):102461. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102461.
- de Zambotti M, Cellini N, Menghini L, Sarlo M, Baker FC. Sensors Capabilities, Performance, and Use of Consumer Sleep Technology. Sleep Med Clin. 2020 Mar;15(1):1-30. doi: 10.1016/j.jsmc.2019.11.003. Epub 2020 Jan 3.
- Perez-Pozuelo I, Zhai B, Palotti J, Mall R, Aupetit M, Garcia-Gomez JM, Taheri S, Guan Y, Fernandez-Luque L. The future of sleep health: a data-driven revolution in sleep science and medicine. NPJ Digit Med. 2020 Mar 23;3:42. doi: 10.1038/s41746-020-0244-4.
- Yetisen AK, Martinez-Hurtado JL, Ünal B, Khademhosseini A, Butt H. Wearables in Medicine. Adv Mater. 2018 Jun 11;30(33):e1706910. doi: 10.1002/adma.201706910.
- Gu W, Leung L, Kwok KC, Wu IC, Folz RJ, Chiang AA. Belun Ring Platform: a novel home sleep apnea testing system for assessment of obstructive sleep apnea. J Clin Sleep Med. 2020 Sep 15;16(9):1611-1617. doi: 10.5664/jcsm.8592.
- Jeremy R. Tietjens, David Claman, Eric J. Kezirian, Teresa De Marco, Armen Mirzayan, Bijan Sadroonri, Andrew N. Goldberg, Carlin Long, Edward P. Gerstenfeld and Yerem Yeghiazarians, Obstructive Sleep Apnea in Cardiovascular Disease: A Review of the Literature and Proposed Multidisciplinary Clinical Management Strategy. J American Heart Asso. 2019 Jan 8. 8(1). org/10.1161/JAHA.118.010440.
- Night-to-night variability in obstructive sleep apnea using peripheral arterial tonometry: a case for multiple night testing. J ClinSleep Med. 2021 Sep 1; 17(9): 1751-1758. org/10.5664/jcsm.9300
- The Healthy Sleep Project addresses the sleep health focus area of Healthy People 2020, which provides science-based, 10-year national objectives for improving the health of all Americans. The sleep health objectives are to increase the medical evaluation of people with symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea, reduce vehicular crashes due to drowsy driving and ensure more Americans get sufficient sleep. For more information, visit projecthealthysleep.org.
- https://aasm.org/rising-prevalence-of-sleep-apnea-in-u-s-threatens-public-health/
- https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(19)30198-5/fulltext