Department of Medical & Biology Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 41566, Republic of Korea.
Molecular Hemodynamic & Computational Laboratory, Daegu 41566, Republic of Korea.
J Healthc Eng. 2022 Aug 17;2022:2561107. doi: 10.1155/2022/2561107. eCollection 2022.
Snoring lowers the quality of sleep, causing many secondary diseases. In response, various types of preventive devices were manufactured, but most of them were far from actual snoring prevention by only sensing snoring and giving feedback. In this study, we proposed a new method to prevent snoring by adjusting the posture during sleep by widening the oropharynx space. An increase in the oropharynx area was confirmed through the expansion of the cervical spine, and a dedicated pillow that can extend through an angle of up to 20° was manufactured. Through this developed method, it was possible to easily extend the cervical spine angle in a supine position to the user, and the frequency of snoring was then tested. As a result, it was confirmed that by using the pillow with an expansion angle of 20° or more, snoring did not occur. Furthermore, looking at the evaluation results of the subjective levels of satisfaction, sleep-related items received an average of 5.9 or higher, and function-related items received high scores with an average of 5.7. We can confirm that the reliability of performance evaluation will be dramatically improved if the scope of the subject group is expanded to include various body types, ages, and genders and conduct performance evaluations for each group.
打鼾会降低睡眠质量，导致许多继发性疾病。针对这种情况，制造了各种类型的预防设备，但大多数设备只能通过感知打鼾并提供反馈，远不能真正预防打鼾。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种通过扩大咽腔空间来调整睡眠时姿势以预防打鼾的新方法。通过扩展颈椎，可以确认咽腔区域的增加，并且制造了一种专用枕头，其角度可扩展至 20°。通过这种开发的方法，可以轻松地将仰卧位时的颈椎角度向用户扩展，然后测试打鼾的频率。结果证实，使用扩展角度为 20°或更大的枕头，就不会出现打鼾的情况。此外，从主观满意度评估结果来看，与睡眠相关的项目平均得分为 5.9 或更高，与功能相关的项目平均得分为 5.7，得分较高。如果将研究对象范围扩大到包括各种体型、年龄和性别，并对每个群体进行性能评估，我们可以确认如果将研究对象范围扩大到包括各种体型、年龄和性别，并对每个群体进行性能评估，那么性能评估的可靠性将得到显著提高。
