Testbed Implementation for the Development of a New Technology to Treat Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Abstract

In 2015, the 5.9 million people diagnosed with Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) cost the United States healthcare system USD 12.4 billion, while the 23.5 million people suffering from OSA undiagnosed extracted costs of USD 149.6 billion from comorbidities, degraded mental health, motor vehicle and workplace accidents, and lost productivity[9]. These numbers only increase when calculated for the global population. Current treatments are cumbersome, uncomfortable, and disrupt the normal sleeping environment, leading to noncompliance among patients. Serious, long-term consequences associated with lack of treatment for OSA in patients include an increased risk for cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and metabolic syndrome disorders that ultimately lead to premature death if untreated.

The Therapeutic Technology Design and Development (TTDD) research group has been working on a Harvard Catalyst project that aims to develop a device to treat OSA. This new technology has the potential to improve compliance in OSA patients by unblocking the patient’s respiratory airway using a different method from the current standard of care. The goal of this research was to implement a testbed for this device using system design principles to optimize prototyping and iterations. The introduction of a testbed capable of simulating a tongue obstructing an artificial airway proved to reduce the time between prototype iterations and allowed the team to keep iterating in the development of the prototype without the need for human testing. For this use case, additional explorations showed that the testbed helped in identifying design flaws responsible for half of the reliability failures presented by the original prototype. Future explorations for this testbed include the validation of biomedical multi-physics computational models of human soft tissue for the design of new obstructive sleep apnea treatment mechanisms.