# A Novel mHealth Approach for the Monitoring and Assisted Therapeutics of Obstructive Sleep Apnea
## 3 Materials and Methods
### User Interface  
Since we live in a society for which smartphones are indispensable, having access to treatment data and having the chance to observe what is really happening during sleep in a more interactive way is certainly a point in favor of this device. More personalized and visually stimulating, a device is most likely to be easier for patients to accept. In this way, an interface was developed to facilitate the visualization of the treatment, as well as to facilitate parameterization so that changes in stimulation parameters could be made instantly, without the need for physical interactions with the device.  
The mobile application, which was developed through the MIT APP Inventor platform, was named _SlzepNea_, and a logo was developed for it, as shown in Figure 12.  
The mobile application has the following two main functions: to display the data about the therapy and to control the device.  
The first function is directed to the user. It allows the user, after waking up from their night of sleep, to access the history of that night. The application shows the number of appneas prevented during the time the device was used, Figure 13A, and also allows access to the data of the whole week through graphs, Figure 13B. To achieve this, the application needs to access the database, in this case _Google Sheet_, where the circuit has previously recorded such data during the therapy time.  
Figure 12: mHealth application start menu.  
This ease of access and demonstration of daily and weekly data can be an asset, since a greater number of apneic events during a specific day can be associated with a behavior manifested on the same day. An example of this might be that there is an increase in the number of apneas every Friday, compared to the rest of the week. If the user is used to meeting friends in a bar on Fridays, the increase in the number of apneas can, for example, be associated with the consumption of alcoholic beverages on that day, which, as described above, may be a factor that potentiates the disease. The user who is aware of this increase through the application can voluntarily avoid these risky behaviors in order to reduce the severity of OSA.  
The application also allows the user to automatically send the weekly treatment report directly to the medical specialist, and to ask questions and/or obtain advice from their medical doctor directly through the application.  
The second aspect of this application meets the medical monitoring, facilitating the doctor-device interaction, in that the parameters of therapy can be changed whenever the medical doctor deems it necessary, without the need for the patient to go to see the specialist, since it can be amended remotely. This differentiates this device from the devices currently available on the market.  
Through a login, the specialist can access the parameterization of the device, Figure 14A. They can, at any time, change the stimulation parameters in a few steps, Figure 14B, and these are then uploaded to the _Google Sheet_. This easy interaction with the treatment is extremely important, since the physician can, after the patient's complaint or after analyzing the weekly report, modify the therapy to meet the patient's needs.  
Figure 13: (**A**) Application’s daily log window and (**B**) application’s bar graph and circle graph windows.