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Comment by andriesm | Hacker News Reader

Wow! Really - this is the one patent-restricted feature I was hoping they were going to solve. I'm curious if a decent quality blood oxygen meter could give me additional data about my sleep apnea. I've previously trief several blood oxygen meters ordered from Amazon, and the results were very low accuracy and low confidence, and the only decent ones couldn't log data continuously over time. (At least not when I bought a few different ones a handful of years ago)

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Oura gives an averaged overnight blood oxygen reading, and gives insight into breathing regularity and any disturbances that it caught.

https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/7328398760851...

> averaged overnight

Which is the opposite of what's needed to understand whether scattered short term variations are breathing stops to worry about.

> regularity

Their variation feature does mark moments of (selectable low/med/high) variance, without the medically diagnostic information that seems to get patent claimants going.

One would then need to get a pre-ban Apple Watch (as it's a software toggle and the ban was not retroactive watches registered before that date continue to support the feature) or other device to monitor and record the data one's doctor needs.

Perhaps you could try a Garmin watch or activity band? Afaict they don't have the same geo restriction. They're less smart as smart watches go, but in return they have better battery life

I have an amazfit bip 2 or 3 and iirc I can enable spo2 monitoring "constantly" I don't because mine is always 99 so I shut it off and just test manually.

It tracks movement and breathing during sleep. I think it now tracks snoring too, wakeups, rem/deep sleep times, and steps, heart rate, and stress levels.

The app is called zepp and I don't know if any of this is exportable but I only care about a cheap watch that has heartrate on it.

Pretty much any modern Garmin will do that really well.

Did you try the ones from https://getwellue.com/? In my informal testing against “medical-grade” SPO2 monitors they were accurate and they record all night long.

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