Sleep Technology

Sleep technologists are a valuable part of the sleep science community. They work to educate, evaluate and treat sleep disorder patients of all ages, and are specially trained to identify polysomnographic services that are safe, aseptic, preventive and restorative.

This article is part three in a four-part series on the ever-changing face of sleep technology. In this article, we’ll address the following questions: What does the future of sleep medicine look like? How will evolving technology change the way sleep studies are done? And, just as importantly, how will economic pressures affect sleep medicine?

Sleep technologists have an important and wide-ranging job. They care for patients with sleep disorders, which can encompass comprehensive evaluation and treatment of sleep disorders, including in-center polysomnographic testing and out-of-center sleep testing; diagnostic and therapeutic interventions; comprehensive patient care; and direct patient education.

Every sleep professional knows that getting the right equipment (and getting it to work right) is crucial for any patient. Sometimes the companies that make durable medical equipment (or DMEs) are extremely helpful when working with patients, while others are not. We asked some of our members to explain their relationship working with DMEs, for better or for worse.

Sleep spindles are an information processing and transferring feature of the sleeping brain. With that in mind, AAST gathered together leading sleep-care professionals to discuss hot topics in the field — transferring information from them to you. AAST board member Allen Boone, RPSGT, RST, CCRA, CCRC, hosts this four-part video series. In our second installment, we have an interview with fellow board members Julie DeWitte, RST, RPSGT, RCP, and Laree J. Fordyce, RST, RPSGT, CCSH, on the topic of why CPAP adherence is so critical.

Jessica Schmidt, RPSGT, CCSH, FACHE, is presenting the breakout session "The Field of Sleep Medicine in the Context of the American Healthcare Landscape” at the AAST 2018 Annual Meeting, Sept. 28-30, 2018, in Indianapolis. We caught up with Schmidt to discuss her background and the future of sleep medicine.

Sleep spindles are an information processing and transferring feature of the sleeping brain. With that in mind, AAST gathered together leading sleep-care professionals to discuss hot topics in the field — transferring information from them to you. AAST board member Allen Boone, RPSGT, RST, CCRA, CCRC, hosts this four-part video series, starting with an interview with fellow board members Julie DeWitte, RST, RPSGT, RCP, and Kristina Weaver, EMPT-P, RPSGT, on the topic of primary care physicians versus sleep specialists.

Recently, I have been reading the book “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker, Ph.D. He not only has a passion for all things sleep, but he has a superb knack for explaining the subject matter in a very friendly and easy-to-understand manner. This is a gift for a writer of science when one is trying to reach a large audience and improve health issues by explaining such sleep topics as “synaptogenesis,” which he whittles down to a definition of “the creation of millions of wiring links, or synapses between neurons” and “an overenthusiastic first pass at setting up the mainframe of a brain” of an infant.

This is the second in a series of articles dealing with the changing landscape of sleep technology. In this article, we’ll take a brief look at our present understanding of sleep as well as review some of the technology we use in our sleep centers.

When I started my sleep career, little did I know all the options that would become available to me. At the time, my belief was that there was the night technologist (me, who did all the work) and then there was a daytime scoring technologist (who did nothing but complain about how I did my job). When I moved into the daytime technologist role, I finally learned how much work that was. I later moved into the manager role, and I realized there were quite a few more jobs I had to cover. One of those jobs was getting patient referrals from physicians to fill the beds in the sleep center. I was told it was “marketing.”