Connected and intelligent device for personalised diagnostic, treatment and management of sleep breathing disorders. SnooZeal-Connect

Obstructive Sleep Apnoea is a condition where the muscles and soft tissues in the throat relax and collapse sufficiently to cause a total blockage of the airway for 10 seconds or more during sleep. OSA is a potentially deadly condition in extreme cases but for moderate OSA patients, fatigue from regularly disturbed sleep can impact heavily on quality of life. If left untreated, the condition increases the risks of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Current treatment requires the continual use of airway obstruction preventative devices worn whilst sleeping. They do not offer any improvement in the underlying cause and are therefore required for nocturnal use for the rest of the person's life. OSA affects approximately 1.5mn people within the UK and despite the market size for sleep apnoea devices being $4.4Bn in 2017, there remains no product that can treat the condition with only surgery as a last resort in severe cases with no guarantee of success.

Snoozeal have developed a device which fits onto the tongue to deliver a daily 20min treatment regime which changes the physiology of the contracting muscle at the rear of the tongue through mild electric pulses, or neuromodulation. Increasing the tongue tone stops it collapsing backwards and blocking the airway, providing a long-term cure.

This project will further develop the Snoozeal device into a connected intelligent platform "SnooZeal-Connect" which will collect biosensor information from the device during treatment. Machine-learning and AI based methods will classify this data to determine the level of sleep apnoea and provide personalised treatment regimes. SnooZeal-Connect will facilitate low-cost convenient intervention at home and close the health and well-being gap for millions of sufferers. It will also reduce the burden on health services by reducing the direct cost of treating severe sleep apnoea, as well as the cost of treating the long-term health impacts from OSA.