Sleep Apnoea: Your CPAP and Sleep Data Are Research Data

Every figure in this guide comes from a published source, linked where it appears and kept in CureCircle's evidence base with the source's own words. It is not medical advice. Read on 7 November 2026.

If you use a CPAP machine, it is quietly recording your nights: hours of use, mask leaks, how many breathing pauses remain. Add a sleep study at diagnosis and your own sense of how rested you feel, and you hold one of the most complete records of any common condition. Research on sleep apnoea, from who sticks with CPAP to what else helps those who cannot, learns from exactly that combination.

How many people live with it

A global analysis estimated that 936 million adults aged 30 to 69 have mild to severe obstructive sleep apnoea. Diagnoses are rising fast: in England, the incidence of OSA increased from 46.74 per 100,000 in 2010 to 91.04 per 100,000 in 2019.

The records worth keeping

NICE's guideline on obstructive sleep apnoea describes the tests and follow-up that leave records:

• The Epworth Sleepiness Scale, used in the preliminary assessment of sleepiness: a short questionnaire whose score can be repeated over time.
• A home sleep study: NICE recommends home respiratory polygraphy for people with suspected OSAHS, or home oximetry where polygraphy is not available. The report states how many breathing events you have per hour.
• CPAP data: for mild sleep apnoea, NICE recommends telemonitoring with CPAP for up to 12 months, and an annual follow-up once CPAP is optimised.

Many CPAP machines keep a usage history you can see in their app or export. Together with your sleep study report and your own notes on how treatment felt, that is a rich record. If you do not have your study report, ask your clinic for a copy.

What sharing it is worth

CureCircle values every contribution with a public benchmark built from what health data has sold for. A complete sleep apnoea story with a year of the records the guideline lists comes to about $99 per licence on the benchmark today. With 90 nights of CPAP or sleep-tracker data, it comes to about $203 per licence, because nightly device data linked to the person's own account of treatment is the kind of real-world evidence research rarely gets. Every line and its source is on the sleep apnoea page.

A licence is not a one-off sale: the same de-identified story can be licensed to several research teams, and you earn a share each time.

How to share it

You start by writing what you live with in your own words; a few quick questions follow, then an AI interviewer asks about the details only you know, and you rate every treatment you tried, CPAP, mouth guards, positional aids, weight loss or anything else. You can add your sleep study report, letters and exported usage summaries as PDFs or photos, and the AI reads them into your own medical file. Before anything is shared, you read the de-identified summary and decide.

Start your story, or read what your health data is worth first.