Internet tools give hope for sleep trouble

Home-based monitoring devices reporting data through the internet may lead to breakthroughs in sleep-disorder research, an international expert says.

New Zealand-born sleep disorder expert Dr Laughton Miles is trialling internet-enabled medical devices in the United States.

He said their practical application to the treatment of sleeping disorders, and other fields of medicine, was likely.

"It's not really a utopian vision; it will happen," he said during a trip to Christchurch from his Californian home.

"I think things work a lot better when you can use simple but still effective technology to comprehensively evaluate people in their own environment.

"No-one's actually ill in a doctor's office. They're ill in their normal environment where they're having sex or taking exercise or not taking exercise or taking big meals. You're really well or sick where you live your life.

"As a future medical device, a lot of people will argue that that's how a lot of medicine is going to be practised."

The devices monitor body indicators during a patient's sleep, such as blood-oxygen levels, nose airflow pressure and whether air passages are obstructed. They feed the information to specialists via the internet.

They are being trialled in the forehead of nasal masks already worn by patients with sleep apnoea, a common condition where breathing difficulties disrupt sleeping patterns.

Miles said use of the internet could allow greater collaboration between cardiac specialists and respiratory specialists, which would help uncover clues about how to attain a perfect night's sleep.

"Breathing abnormalities and cardiac abnormalities, either independently or together, can really make a big difference," he said.

Miles, who has been in the medical field since graduation from the Otago School of Medicine in 1958, said he slept fairly well himself, although everyone experienced occasional transient insomnia, where they had difficulty falling asleep.

"You can learn to sleep good or learn to sleep badly -- it's conditioning," he said.

Someone may fall asleep easily in front of the television set but find this harder to achieve in bed with a partner around with whom they were tense or unhappy. The use of sleeping pills or other treatments could also become a conditioning factor, he said.

An earlier machine, produced by Miles' company Vitalog (which has since been sold), was the first battery-operated, portable, digital monitoring device to record a patient's body temperature, electrical activity of the heart, body movement and skin conductivity.

- © Fairfax NZ News