Obstructive Sleep Apnoea is a condition where the muscles and soft tissues in the throat relax and collapse sufficiently to cause a total blockage of the airway for 10 seconds or more during sleep. OSA is a potentially deadly condition in extreme cases but for moderate OSA patients, fatigue from regularly disturbed sleep can impact heavily on quality of life. If left untreated, the condition increases the risks of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Current treatment requires the continual use of airway obstruction preventative devices worn whilst sleeping. They do not offer any improvement in the underlying cause and are therefore required for nocturnal use for the rest of the person's life. OSA affects approximately 1.5mn people within the UK and despite the market size for sleep apnoea devices being $4.4Bn in 2017, there remains no product that can treat the condition with only surgery as a last resort in severe cases with no guarantee of success. Snoozeal have developed a device which fits onto the tongue to deliver a daily 20min treatment regime which changes the physiology of the contracting muscle at the rear of the tongue through mild electric pulses, or neuromodulation. Increasing the tongue tone stops it collapsing backwards and blocking the airway, providing a long-term cure. This project will further develop the Snoozeal device into a connected intelligent platform "SnooZeal-Connect" which will collect biosensor information from the device during treatment. Machine-learning and AI based methods will classify this data to determine the level of sleep apnoea and provide personalised treatment regimes. SnooZeal-Connect will facilitate low-cost convenient intervention at home and close the health and well-being gap for millions of sufferers. It will also reduce the burden on health services by reducing the direct cost of treating severe sleep apnoea, as well as the cost of treating the long-term health impacts from OSA.

Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA) is a sleep related respiratory condition, leading to repeated temporary cessations of breathing because of a narrowing or closure of the upper airway during sleep. Core symptoms of OSA include excessive daytime sleepiness and snoring. OSA can affect anyone, but is more common in some people, e.g. those who are male, middle aged, elderly, and over-weight. OSA is closely associated with serious health problems, including hypertension, diabetes, stroke and heart disease. It can shorten life expectancy and it also leads to road collisions caused by undiagnosed sleepy drivers. In short, OSA is currently a significant health care burden in the UK, for individuals, for the NHS, and for society as a whole. Current treatments require the use of the device whilst sleeping and are temporary splinting measures not cures so will be required for the rest of the person’s life. Despite the market size for anti-snoring devices, there remains no product that treats the condition and no actual cure except for surgery which has no guarantee of success. The SnooZeal product consists of a tongue sleeve-like device which is inserted in the mouth over the tongue for 2 sessions of 20 minutes a day for an initial treatment period of 6 weeks. This strengthens the muscle at the rear of the tongue through mild electric pulses to stop it collapsing backwards, and thereby stopping snoring. The device not only elevates the symptoms of snoring and mild OSA, and assists in the management of moderate and severe OSA as it reverses the physiological change with a possibility of a long-term cure with regular maintainance .