From data to diagnosis

An estimated 1 billion people worldwide are living with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), yet approximately 85% remain undiagnosed. This matters because undiagnosed OSA can significantly impact patients’ quality of life and increase the risk of other conditions like hypertension, heart disease and stroke. While these figures are staggering, innovations in consumer wearables are creating an opportunity to bridge this gap – not as a replacement for medical-grade diagnosis, but as a catalyst for earlier identification and intervention.

Consumer wearables: An OSA alarm

Consumer wearable devices like smartwatches and smart rings are now cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to collect health data, including respiratory rate and breathing disruptions. Because these devices are already part of many consumers' daily lives, they offer a more accessible entry point into the sleep health journey by flagging patterns that may warrant clinical evaluation.

This wearable data can alert patients to potential OSA symptoms, prompting early conversations with their providers. These insights help clinicians determine if further testing is needed, supporting earlier diagnoses, interventions and treatments. Once diagnosed, the right therapy – such as CPAP – can be selected to best fit the patient’s needs and boost adherence. CPAP therapy has been linked with notable improvements in sleepiness, mood, anxiety, cognition and quality of life. While consumer wearables are already playing a role in helping patients raise sleep concerns with their providers, this is just the beginning of their potential to support ongoing OSA care.

The OSA opportunity: Data-driven insights for smarter care

The true promise of consumer wearables in OSA care extends beyond early detection – it's their ability to continuously monitor patient health.

These devices collect 24/7 longitudinal data spanning both sleep metrics and daytime performance. Over time, this data could give clinicians a broader view of a patient's health between appointments, as well as their general quality of life. When nighttime sleep data is paired with daytime indicators like activity, recovery and overall performance, care teams can gain a clearer view of whether the patient’s OSA therapy is effective.

These insights could help clinicians identify unresolved symptoms, detect when patients are struggling with adherence and make timelier adjustments to treatment plans. This data-driven personalization has the potential to shift OSA patient care from intermittent check-ins to true proactive condition management.

Looking ahead: Making longitudinal OSA care a reality

A more connected, continuous and patient-centered model of care is shaping the future of sleep medicine. Consumer wearables are not a standalone solution, but they can bring more patients into the care pathway earlier than before. Their greatest value may prove to be in helping clinicians better understand how therapy truly impacts patients' daily lives over time. By continuously collecting information on both sleep and daytime performance, the data from these devices could enable a level of insight that episodic clinical visits simply cannot provide.

AI is another factor that is rapidly changing health care, which could also play an important role in making longitudinal OSA care truly scalable. With the ability to analyze the vast amounts of clinical and consumer data that are being collected, AI could help identify patterns and insights that reveal how OSA presents differently across patient populations. This intelligence has the potential to enable a shift to improved personalization of OSA therapy, tailored to patients’ unique needs via better algorithms, diagnosis and clinical efficiency.

By taking an open-minded approach to integrating new technologies like consumer wearables and AI into OSA care, sleep and respiratory stakeholders can help drive a future filled with earlier diagnoses, more personalized treatments, and improved long-term outcomes at a population level. Getting there will require collaboration across the industry – from device manufacturers to health care providers to payers – to establish the right frameworks, data standards and clinical validation that will build confidence in these tools. The opportunity to transform OSA care is within reach, but only if we move forward thoughtfully together.

Dan Leonard is the Business Leader of Philips Sleep & Respiratory Care (S&RC), overseeing S&RC’s end-to-end global business operations. Dan has deep experience in the sleep and respiratory space and is passionate about the vision to enable better care for more people.