Can a phone detect irregular breathing during sleep?

Your compatible phone can analyze breathing sounds while you sleep, mark possible pauses and shallow-breathing patterns, and help you find the moments worth reviewing in the morning. You can inspect the waveform and hear the available sound before and after a mark—without buying another device.

SomniSense, a sleep apnea detector app, uses our own audio algorithms, developed through research paired with clinical sleep-study labels (PSG). The useful question is not just “how high is the accuracy?” It is what was tested, and what you can check in your own recording.

What our research found

Our research used 80 person-nights from 40 participants, including 2,953 labeled 200-second breathing windows. It supports the method behind the analysis, with results reported for each task:

Two tested tasks, with different units:

• One-second snore segments: five-seed means of 94.29% accuracy, 91.67% sensitivity and 89.01% precision across 13,538 labeled segments.
• 200-second breathing windows: the CA-1D study reports 87.14% mean accuracy over five seeds; the separate compression study reports 88.49% accuracy and 88.06% F1 in its single-seed evaluation.

These results show that small audio models can recognize the labeled patterns in the research data. They are not a clinical accuracy score for each app mark, a clinical test or a diagnosis of sleep apnea. Sensitivity describes how many reference annotations were found; precision describes how many model detections matched the reference.

From a number to a moment you can check

Your Night Report gives you a place to start: a breathing reading, the marked times behind it and the available surrounding audio. Open a marked moment, look for the change in sound, then listen before and after it. You do not have to listen through an entire night to find that context.

The accuracy guide gives the task-by-task results; the research page explains the paired recordings and methods. They let you inspect the basis for the analysis alongside the real record on your phone.

Give tonight’s recording a fair start

Use a stable, uncovered nightstand, follow the app’s placement guidance and leave enough battery for the recording. Another sleeper, room noise and phone position can affect the captured sound, so check the surrounding audio when reviewing a mark.

SomniSense is for adults aged 18 and over. A low reading or no candidate marks does not rule out a sleep-breathing condition. Symptoms or concerns still deserve qualified medical advice, whatever the app shows.