Hear the silence. See the duration. Know when it happened.

The first time I heard my own silence

The eleven seconds at 3:47 a.m. that I keep mentioning — that was a breathing pause.

You don't notice these when they happen because they end with you waking up briefly to breathe again, and the wake-up is short enough that conscious memory doesn't keep it. Your body remembers — that's why you're tired in the morning. But the actual events are invisible to you in real time.

That's the whole reason this feature matters. The events don't announce themselves. You have to look for them on a recording.

Two kinds, both counted

Sleep medicine counts two kinds of breathing irregularity:

Apnea-like events. Breathing fully stops for at least 10 seconds. Usually ends with a gasp or arousal. The silence is unmistakable when you hear it — which is why we let you hear it.

Hypopnea-like events. Breathing reduces by ~30% or more for at least 10 seconds. Acoustically subtler. Just as disruptive to oxygen levels and sleep architecture as full pauses, even though they sound less dramatic.

Both count toward your BRI (Breathing Irregularity Index) — same per-hour event-rate scale clinicians call AHI.

What you get per night

• Apnea event count (full pauses ≥ 10 seconds)
• Hypopnea event count (reduced breathing ≥ 10 seconds)
• BRI per night and trend across nights
• Severity bucket — Normal (<5) / Mild (5–15) / Moderate (15–30) / Severe (>30)
• Time-stamped event list — when each event happened, how long, what type
• Audio playback for any event (See & Hear)

The numbers, honestly

For breathing irregularity detection, validated against in-lab PSG (n=70+ paired nights):

The 80% is intentional. We tuned the model to be precision-first. We'd rather miss a borderline event than wake you up worried about a false alarm. The trade-off: if the lab said your AHI was 14, we might say BRI 11. But if we say BRI 18, you can trust it's at least 18.

Reading the severity numbers

BRI uses the same scale clinicians use for AHI:

• BRI < 5 — within normal range
• BRI 5–15 — what they call mild
• BRI 15–30 — moderate
• BRI > 30 — severe

If your BRI runs above 15 consistently, that's a clinic conversation, not an app conversation. SomniSense is here to give you the data. It's not here to tell you what to do with it.

The reason this number matters more after 50

Here's the part most consumer sleep apps avoid saying directly. Each breathing pause briefly drops your blood oxygen. The brain is the most oxygen-hungry organ in the body. When sleep is the time the brain is supposed to be recovering — clearing waste, consolidating memory — and instead it's being intermittently under-supplied for years, that has a downstream cost.

The published research on untreated moderate-to-severe OSA over decades correlates it with hypertension, cardiovascular events, and accelerated cognitive decline. We're not the ones to tell you what your individual risk is — that's a sleep specialist with your full history. What we can do is make sure the number gets seen at 50, instead of getting noticed at 70 when it's already been quietly working against you for twenty years. That's the actual reason continuous monitoring matters more than a one-night study.

What this is not

• Not a diagnosis of sleep apnea. Diagnosis needs in-lab PSG or Type-III HSAT plus a clinician.
• Not validated for users under 18.
• Not a substitute for your CPAP's compliance report. If you're on CPAP, that machine's data is more authoritative for treatment decisions.

What it is: an acoustic estimator that gives you organized evidence over weeks, so you can decide — with information — whether to seek clinical evaluation.