Kenek Edge Pulse Oximeter for iPhone

Technically it works. I just started CPAP therapy for sleep apnea so wanted to monitor my blood oxygen level through the night to track effectiveness of the therapy. This is possible with the item. However, the reality is that it's not going to be useful for my purpose. The thing requires a lot of finickly resetting of iPhone functions...permissions, volume level, music settings...(I had to call their support line for help with this - the help was good but why should I have to call just to get it to work?) ...and it requires you turn off auto lock so the screen will remain on constantly while monitoring. Also, you can't hook it up to a wall charger while monitoring....so, if you're like most people and charge your phone at night, this thing requires you to run the phone with screen open without charger the whole night.I thought maybe I could live with all that for maybe once a week monitoring...it does apparently work while hooked up to an external battery and I have one of those. But then, when I tested it for a few minutes and checked the recorded results I found that the results are not synthesized or processed in any way (a graph of the monitoring period would be nice) and in fact are not visible at all on the phone. The results go into a csv file (Excel) which can be emailed. Ok, I can deal with that...but then found that the output file shows one row of readings PER SECOND of the monitoring period. So, for an 8-hour sleep monitoring session, 28,800 rows of information. The raw data in this form is nearly meaningless. Yes, it can be processed into a graph in Excel but ... why doesn't the app do that? Are they really thinking that every time I want to monitor and interpret results I'm going to juggle 30,000 rows of info into a usable Excel graph?As I said: technically it works. But in reality, it doesn't work for me.

I have been waking up feeling super tired lately and a friend suggested doing a sleep study for sleep apnea, which would be more than $1,000 out of pocket with my high-deductible health insurance plan. Since oxygen level drops during sleep are a key indicator of sleep apnea, I decided to just get this device and measure my oxygen levels overnight. I used it with an iPhone 6s, and left the app running overnight, sleeping with the phone next to me. I started with a battery charge of 93% and ended with battery chart at 58%. I turned off the screen using the power button while recording overnight. In the morning, I emailed the data file to myself and then uploaded it to the company's graphing tool and was glad to see that my oxygen levels stayed well above 90% most of the night, making sleep apnea unlikely -- so this was $40 really well spent! I tested the oxygen and heart rate readings against another company's portable oxygen/heart rate monitor (which I bought before, not realizing that it doesn't have a recording feature), and the readings were within 1% on both.The two negatives that I encountered were:-The finger clip is pretty tight, so the top of the tip of my finger was quite sore in the morning; would be great if there was a way to make it more comfortable, but it stayed on just fine-I wanted to turn off the phone screen to make sure the battery lasts overnight. I tested turning the screen on and off first, to make sure the app would keep running and noticed that sometimes turning off the screen would also turn off the sensor, and sometimes it would let the sensor keep running (you can tell by looking for the red light to stay on on the sensor); if the red light on the sensor is lighted, the app is running properly. Not sure if this inconsistent behavior is a bugEven with these negatives, this seems like a great product, especially at this price point.

The oximeter worked for me -- it answered a key question for me - what are my low SPo2 readings and when during my sleep cycle do they occur. Here are some observations and suggestions and a recommendation. OBSERVATIONS: 1. Do not run the oximeter while charging the iPhone. The iPhone gets really hot. The oximeter software uses a lot of juice so I figured my iPhone charge might not last all night. Lesson learned - don't charge and run oximeter at same time. 2. The version of software I used allowed me to record multiple hours of data. 3. The Kenek graph on the website was not what I needed to see - I wanted a simple graph of time versus heart rate and SpO2. For this I used an Excel spreadsheet. SUGGESTIONS: 1. Provide a way to import data to iPad/iPhone spreadsheet Numbers and display a graph of time versus heart rate and SpO2 or do this with the Kenek website grapher. 2. I didn't find the finger device to be uncomfortable. However, it is kind of clunky to have wires attached to me while trying to sleep. There are SpO2 devices that use Bluetooth and are wearable on the wrist rather than on the finger. But, they are much more expensive than ~$40. 3. Allow the software to run in the background with the display turned off (suggested software improvement). Recommendation: I have a Fitbit and would have liked to have had a set of modular sleep study devices connected to a Fitbit. This could be one of those devices.