Previous studies have shown that Automatic Positive Airway Pressure (APAP) devices display different behaviors when connected to a bench using theoretical respiratory cycle scripts. However, these scripts are limited and do not simulate physiological behavior during the night. Our aim was to develop a physiological bench that is able to simulate patient breathing airflow by integrating polygraph data. We developed an algorithm analyzing polygraph data and transformed this information into digital inputs required by the bench hardware to reproduce a patient breathing profile on bench. The inputs are respectively the simulated respiratory muscular effort pressure input for an artificial lung and the sealed chamber pressure to regulate the Starling resistor. We did simulations on our bench for a total of 9 hours and 23 minutes for a breathing profile from the demonstration recording of a Nox T3 Sleep Monitor. The simulation performance results showed that in terms of relative peak-valley amplitude of each breathing cycle, simulated bench airflow was biased by only 1.48% ± 6.8% compared to estimated polygraph nasal airflow for a total of 6,479 breathing cycles. For total respiratory cycle time, the average bias ± standard deviation was 0.000 ± 0.288 seconds. For patient apnea events, our bench simulation had a sensitivity of 84.7% and a positive predictive value equal to 90.3%, considering 149 apneas detected both in polygraph nasal airflow and simulated bench airflow. Our new physiological bench can personalize APAP device selection to each patient by taking into account individual characteristics of a sleep breathing profile.

The uploaded Zip file contains the original polygraph data issuing from one-night demonstration recording by a Nox T3 Monitor (Nox Medical, Reykjavik, Iceland), used by our study. They are respectively activity (20 Hz), RIP abdomen (25 Hz), RIP thorax (25 Hz), RIP flow (25 Hz), nasal pressure (200 Hz), spO2 (3 Hz), audio volume (100 Hz) signals. It contains also all bench test result raw data, which were registered during bench simulation of the breathing profile contained in the previously described polygraph recordings. In the bench test result raw data files, the column Flow corresponds to the airflow simulated on bench, sampled at 20 Hz, with a unit of L/min. The column P1 corresponds to the pressure (cmH2O) measured at the upstream of Starling resistor, sampled at 20Hz. The column P2 corresponds to the sealed chamber pressure (cmH2O) of Starling resistor, sampled at 20Hz. The column TTL represents the count of respiratory cycles.