Gathering Breathing Data to Show Your Doctor

What this can and cannot do

Start with what to expect, because it shapes everything after. Snore Timeline listens through your phone's microphone and labels the sounds it hears. It flags a breathing disruption when it hears steady breathing for a full minute, then complete silence for 10 seconds or more, then a recovery sound that breaks the silence. Each one gets logged with a timestamp, the length of the silence, and how loud the recovery breath was. That's a useful record of the audible events across your night.

What it can't do is look inside your airway. The app can't measure blood oxygen, airflow, or chest movement on its own, and those are the core of a professional sleep assessment. Since it's working from sound, it can only catch events you could hear, so treat its counts as a conservative estimate and never as a complete record.

Setting up to capture breathing

Breathing is the quietest thing the app listens for, and disruption detection depends on it. A few setup choices give the app the clearest signal:

• Put the phone 1 to 2 feet from your head. Breathing fades fast with distance, so a phone across the room may not pick it up at all. Keep it on the nightstand or somewhere bedside, within reach of a charging cable. The placement guidance covers this in full.
• Record at High Fidelity quality. Detection works at every quality level, so this is about playback. High Fidelity captures the widest frequency range, which makes faint breathing and recovery sounds audible when you or a doctor listen back. See the quality tiers for the trade-offs.
• Quiet the room. Fans, white noise machines, air purifiers, HVAC, an open window, and a TV left on can all cover up the breathing the app is listening for. Once the room sits above 45 dB at rest, the app may miss the quiet events.
• Record several nights. One night can be a fluke. A handful shows a doctor a pattern. The breathing disruption assessment needs at least 2 hours of sleep a night to calculate, so go for full recordings.

One caveat worth repeating to your doctor. Since the app only hears audible events, it probably undercounts. It can miss quiet disruptions, events with no breathing effort, and events that end without an audible recovery. That's just how listening works, and it's covered under detection conditions.

Reading your results

After each recording, the nightly summary gathers up what the app heard. A few numbers matter most when you're getting ready to talk to a doctor:

• Disruptions per hour is the main breathing metric. The app divides detected disruptions by your hours of sleep and rates the result. Under 1 is Minimal, 1 to 3 is Mild, 3 to 5 is Notable, and more than 5 is Significant. The rate isn't a medical score.
• The recovery breath value, shown like +15 dB, is how much louder the breath that broke the silence was than the quiet before it. A higher number means a more forceful recovery. Your summary shows the peak for the night.
• The longest pause of the night gets its own severity rating. Under 12 seconds is mild, 12 to 20 is moderate, and over 20 is severe.
• The nightly assessment needs at least 2 hours of sleep to show up. If a short night or too little audible breathing keeps it hidden, record a fuller night with the phone close by.

You can also check any single event yourself. Breathing disruptions show as pale purple markers on the timeline, and tapping one in the summary jumps to that moment so you can listen. For recordings made in a quiet room, the app shapes playback a little so faint breathing is easier to hear. The metrics page explains each number, and Timeline & Playback covers listening back.

If you wear an Apple Watch that records blood oxygen, the summary can also show how much of the night you spent below 95% saturation and your lowest reading, read through Apple Health. See Apple Watch biometrics. Those numbers come from the watch, and they round out what you bring to a doctor.

Building a report to bring

Once you have several nights recorded, package them into one file with Export Report:

1. Open the export screen and pick a date range. Last 7 days, Last 30 days, or All time. A range that spans your recorded nights gives a doctor the trend instead of a single snapshot.
2. Choose which categories to include. For breathing, the ones that matter are Nightly Summary, which has each night's totals including Total Breathing Disruptions, and Detected Events, which lists every event with its timestamp, silence duration, and recovery strength. Add Watch Biometrics if you wear a watch.
3. Include audio if you want it. Per-Episode Clips packages a separate clip for each detected episode, with a couple of seconds of context around each one. Audio only covers the night you're currently viewing, even when the CSV range is wider.
4. Generate the report. The app bundles each category as its own CSV inside one ZIP archive, named by its date range. Tap Share Export to send it by email, Messages, or AirDrop, or save it to Files.

The CSV files open in Numbers, Excel, or Google Sheets, with timestamps in ISO 8601 format. For the full column list and where the files end up on your phone, see Export & Sharing and its notes on sending a report to a doctor.

What to bring and how to say it

When you sit down with a doctor or ENT, present the data for what it is. You recorded several nights of audio, the app organized the audible events, and you brought the summary so the two of you can go through it together. A short, straight framing works well:

• Lead with the pattern. Give your typical disruptions per hour across the nights you recorded, your longest pauses, and whether the numbers held steady or moved. The Weekly Summary shows night-to-night trends if that helps.
• Name the method. Say plainly that this is audio analysis from a phone, so it only captures events loud enough to hear and probably undercounts. That helps a doctor weigh it properly.
• Bring the raw material. Hand over the ZIP report and a clip or two. Recordings give a doctor something concrete to react to.
• Mention symptoms. Daytime sleepiness, morning headaches, or a partner who's noticed pauses in your breathing are all worth raising. The app can't weigh those. A professional can.

If you use CPAP, you can record nights with and without it and compare, which the app tracks as a built-in factor. See the CPAP notes for how that comparison works and where it falls short. Your recordings stay on your device throughout. Nothing leaves your phone until you choose to share it, as the Privacy Policy explains.