The University of Washington (UW) has developed an app that helps detect sleep apnea, called ApneaApp. App development was funded by the National Science Foundation and the University of Washington.

UW said that usually, to diagnose sleep apnea, providers need to use sensors attached to the user's body and special equipment, but ApneaApp can detect sleep apnea using inaudible sound waves emanating from the phone’s speakers to track breathing patterns. The app also screens out audible background noise from, for example, people talking, cars honking, or a bedroom fan.

“Right now phones have sensing capabilities that we don’t fully appreciate,” Director of the UW Networks and Mobile Systems lab Shyam Gollakota said in a statement. “If you can recalibrate the sensors that most phones already have, you can use them to achieve really amazing things.”

In a clinical study of 37 patients undergoing sleep studies at Harborview Medical Center, researchers found that 98 percent of the time ApneaApp captured sleep apnea events as accurately as a hospital polysomnography tests. Patients who participated in the study slept with a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone on the corner of a bed. The app tracked different respiratory events over 300 hours of testing, including central apnea, obstructive apnea, and hypopnea. These tests had between 95 and 99 percent accuracy when compared to intensive polysomnography.

The study also found that tests in a home bedroom setting showed ApneaApp can work at distances of up to three feet.

UW researchers said they are "exploring the process" of getting the device FDA cleared. So, ApneaApp could be available to consumers in the next year or two.

“Right now we don’t have enough sleep clinics, sleep laboratories and sleep specialists in the country to address all the sleep apnea that is out there,” Professor of Neurology and co-director of the UW Medicine Sleep Center Dr. Nathaniel F. Watson said in a statement. “These initial results are impressive and suggest that ApneaApp has the potential to be a simple, noninvasive way for the average person to identify sleep apnea events at home and hopefully seek treatment.”