Run a fair experiment and let the numbers tell you whether the change helped.
You started CPAP, slipped in a mandibular mouthpiece, trained yourself onto your side, cut the evening drink, or shed a few pounds. Now you want to know whether it worked. Snore Timeline records the same sounds every night, so you can compare nights with your change against nights without it and watch the pattern emerge. This guide sets up that comparison so the answer you get reflects the change you made, not the noise around it.
Snore Timeline listens to your sleep sounds; it does not measure airflow, oxygen, or therapy pressure. When you test something like CPAP here, you are observing patterns in your own recordings, not assessing whether the therapy is working clinically. Treat the results as personal insight to bring to your doctor, never as a diagnosis or a verdict on your treatment.
Decide up front which numbers count as success. Picking one or two metrics keeps you honest later, when a single quiet night tempts you to declare victory early. These numbers map onto the common goals:
If you are not sure what the app counts as a snore or a disruption, read How Detection Works and Episodes & Events first, so the numbers mean what you think they mean.
Change one thing at a time. If you start a mouthpiece and cut alcohol in the same week, a drop in snoring cannot tell you which one earned the credit. Test one variable, lock in the result, then move to the next.
The app builds the comparison from sleep factors you tag on each night's summary. Snore Timeline ships with 23 built-in factors across four categories, and several match the fixes people test:
If your fix has no built-in match, for example a new pillow or losing weight, create a custom factor: name it and assign it to one of the four categories. The full list lives in Sleep Score & Sleep Factors.
One rule makes the comparison work: tag the factor only on the nights you had it. Tag CPAP on the nights you wear it and leave it off on the nights you skip it. If you tag a factor every single night, there are no factor-free nights to compare against, so the app can never show a correlation.
One night proves nothing. Sleep swings around for reasons unrelated to your fix, so the app waits until it has enough data to separate signal from noise. Until then you see the Building Insights message: a progress bar toward unlocking the comparison, how many more nights it needs, and the factors you have tracked so far.
To unlock the comparison for a factor you need:
The app looks back over the last 8 weeks of your data, and the more nights you record, the more confident the result. Five nights clears the gate; a few weeks gives you an answer you can lean on.
For a fair comparison, keep everything except the change you are testing as steady as you can:
Turn on the bedtime reminder so you remember to record both kinds of nights. A run of CPAP nights with no untagged nights between them leaves nothing to compare against, and the comparison stays locked.
Once you cross the thresholds, the What Affected Your Sleep section of the Weekly Summary shows a correlation card for your factor, each carrying a plain-language verdict drawn from an impact score:
Tap the card to expand a side-by-side comparison of nights with the factor against nights without it. It lays out Snore Time, Events per Hour, Disruptions, and Sleep Talking time, then under a Sleep Quality heading compares Sleep Score and Sleep Efficiency. Each metric shows the "with" and "without" groups with small bars, and the card lists how many nights fell into each group, for example "4 nights with · 6 without."
Worked example: you tag CPAP on the nights you wear it and skip the tag otherwise. After a handful of nights of each kind, the card shows breathing disruptions, snore time, and the rest side by side, so you can see whether your tagged nights came out ahead. Disruption counting on quiet equipment is covered in Breathing Disruptions.
These verdicts summarize patterns in your own recordings and may reflect other habits happening at the same time. A "Better sleep" card on CPAP shows that your tagged nights looked better in the audio, which is not the same as confirming the therapy works. Bring the comparison to your doctor for that conversation.
The factor card answers "did my change help on the nights I used it." The Weekly Summary answers a second question: "is the overall trend moving the way I want." Use both, because a real improvement should show up in the week's averages too.
The Weekly Summary gives you a 7-day overview and compares it against the previous week, each metric showing a week-over-week change. Most metrics show the change as a percentage; Peak Volume, measured in decibels, shows the difference in dB. When the previous week had no data to compare against, the change reads 0% in a neutral color rather than flagging a trend. Daily charts plot the last 7 days so you see which nights ran better or worse, not only the weekly total.
For a snoring fix, watch Snore Time, Snoring Signals, and Signals Per Hour. A downward trend in these from one week to the next means less snoring activity overall. Sleep Score & Weekly Trends covers the full set of metrics.
Read the trend, not a single night. Adopt the change, let a week or two of tagged and untagged nights accumulate, then compare the weeks. If the factor card says "Better sleep" while the weekly trend slopes down, you have two views agreeing, and that is as close to an answer as your own data can give you.
Heading to a sleep appointment? Export the comparison and the weekly numbers to bring with you. Doctor-Ready Data walks through pulling the data together, and Export & Sharing covers the formats.
