Gathering Breathing Data to Show Your Doctor

What this can and cannot do

Start by setting your expectations, because they shape everything that follows. Snore Timeline listens through your phone's microphone and labels the sounds it hears. It flags a breathing disruption when it detects consistent breathing for a full minute, then complete silence lasting 10 seconds or more, then a recovery sound that breaks the silence. It logs each one with a timestamp, the length of the silence, and how loud the recovery breath was. That is a useful record of audible events across your night.

What it does not do is look inside your airway. The app cannot measure blood oxygen, airflow, or chest movement on its own, and those are central to a professional sleep assessment. Because detection is acoustic, it can only catch events you can hear, so treat its counts as a conservative estimate rather than a complete record.

Setting up to capture breathing

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

• Place 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. Keep it on a nightstand or bedside surface 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 choice 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, open windows, and a TV left on can mask the breathing patterns the app listens for. When the room sits above 45 dB at baseline, the app may miss quiet events.
• Record several nights, not one. A single night can be unusual; a handful shows a doctor a pattern. The breathing disruption assessment needs at least 2 hours of sleep a night to calculate, so aim for full recordings.

One caution worth repeating to your doctor: because the app hears only audible events, it likely undercounts. It can miss quiet disruptions, events with no breathing effort, and events that end without an audible recovery. That is a property of acoustic detection, covered under detection conditions.

Reading your results

After each recording, the nightly summary gathers what the app heard. A few numbers carry the most weight when you are preparing to talk to a doctor:

• Disruptions per hour is the primary 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. This rate is not a medical score.
• The recovery breath value, shown like +15 dB, measures how much louder the breath that broke the silence was than the quiet before it. A higher number points to a more forceful recovery. Your summary shows the peak for the night.
• The longest pause of the night appears with 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 appear. If a short night or too little audible breathing means it does not show, record a fuller night with the phone close by.

You can also confirm any single event yourself. Breathing disruptions appear as pale purple markers on the timeline, and tapping one in the summary jumps to that moment so you can listen. In a recording made in a quiet room, the app gently shapes playback 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 the share of the night spent below 95% saturation and your lowest reading, read through Apple Health. See Apple Watch biometrics. These come from the watch, not the audio, 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 the Export Report feature. Here is the workflow:

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 rather than a single snapshot.
2. Choose which categories to include. For breathing, the ones that matter are Nightly Summary, which carries 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. Optionally include audio. Per-Episode Clips package a separate clip for each detected episode, with a couple of seconds of context around each. Note that audio covers only the night you are currently viewing, even when the CSV range is wider.
4. Generate the report. The app bundles each category as its own CSV inside a single 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 land 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, frame 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 review it together. A short, honest framing works well:

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

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