CES 2025: Medical Technology between Daily Life and Clinic

Apneal at CES 2025: Detecting sleep apnea with your smartphone

Deeptech start-up Apneal is showcasing an app in Las Vegas that uses ordinary smartphones for medical diagnosis. The application for sleep apnea addresses a disease that affects over 900 million people worldwide.

The technology uses the sensors built into the smartphone - accelerometer, gyroscope and microphone - to detect nocturnal breathing disorders. The device is simply attached to the chest with a standard adhesive strip. The collected data, up to 3,000 measuring points per second, is analyzed using artificial intelligence and achieves an impressive accuracy of 90 percent compared to conventional polysomnography examinations. Particularly noteworthy is the low-threshold access to diagnostics, which makes the previous time-consuming procedure in sleep laboratories obsolete. The app not only detects severe, but also mild and moderate cases of sleep apnoea - a capability that, according to Apnela, conventional wearables have not yet mastered.

In preparation: Medical certification according to MDR and FDA

The collected data is processed in detailed reports and can be seamlessly integrated into existing medical systems. Apneal is currently undergoing one of the largest sleep studies for medical device validation with over 1,000 patients in Europe. CE marking and FDA approval are targeted for 2025, with full market entry planned for 2026. The innovation is supported by the EIT Health Flagship consortium with a budget of 2.2 million euros.