Disclaimer: Due to health regulations and clearances, some ScanWatch features may not be available or may not have clinical validation in your region. Learn more.
Breathing disturbances and Breathing Quality Assessment
Breathing Quality Assessment is the detection of breathing disturbances, which are interruptions in your sleep patterns. These disturbances may impair the restorativeness of sleep and could also be associated with conditions.
With Breathing Quality Assessment, ScanWatch gives access to new preventive health information. Withings also provides self-assessment content, articles on breathing disorders, and actionable lifestyle tips to help users learn how disturbances can impact sleep and what people can do to reduce these instances.
ScanWatch is able to detect the presence of breathing disturbances through a motion sensor, blood oxygen sensor, and an HR sensor that emits and absorbs light waves passing through blood vessels. With the Respiratory Scan feature, the watch can measure oxygen saturation levels all night long to identify when levels are inadequate due to breathing disturbances.
SpO2's role in Breathing Quality Assessment
Oxygen saturation (Blood oxygen) is a measurement of how much oxygen your blood is carrying as a percentage of the maximum it could carry. For a healthy individual, normal Blood oxygen should be between 90% and 100%.
Normally, for people who have Blood oxygen levels below 90, they run the risk of developing hypoxemia. Symptoms may include shortness of breath, especially during brief exercise or even while at rest.
The oximeter is non-invasive, painless, and often recommended by doctors because it can detect indicators of certain diseases such as COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), asthma, pneumonia, lung cancer, heart attack or heart failure.
Comparing ScanWatch's Breathing Quality Assessment data to Sleep/Sleep Analyzer
These two products use two different techniques:
- Sleep/Sleep Analyzer uses respiratory and cardiac rhythm: It provides sleep analysis close to polysomnography, the medical gold standard for sleep monitoring.
- ScanWatch uses a blood oxygen sensor: This sensor is a non-invasive method of measuring oxygen saturation in the blood that, along with advanced machine learning, makes the detection of breathing disturbances possible.