Sleep & Oxygen Reimagined—Our Commitment to a Healthier You!

It's easy to assume CPAP has been around forever — it has that kind of institutional, unremarkable-medical-equipment feel to it. In reality, continuous positive airway pressure therapy is younger than the IBM PC. The entire history of CPAP, from garage prototype to a treatment used by an estimated 30 million-plus people worldwide, spans less than 45 years — and it starts with one doctor, one very frustrated patient, and one household vacuum cleaner.

There's already plenty of content covering the basics: women are more likely to go undiagnosed with sleep apnea than men, and their symptoms often look different — fatigue and mood changes instead of loud snoring. That's true, and worth knowing. But it undersells the actual scope of the problem.
The deeper issue isn't just that women present differently. It's that the tools used to diagnose sleep apnea — the testing thresholds, the scoring criteria, even the home sleep test technology itself — were developed and validated primarily on male-dominated research populations. That history is still baked into how sleep apnea gets diagnosed today, and it's a bigger factor in the underdiagnosis gap than symptom awareness alone.

"Sleep divorce" — couples choosing to sleep in separate rooms — has become a well-covered trend, and CPAP noise shows up constantly as one of the reasons. The narrative writes itself: partner gets diagnosed, partner starts using a machine, the hum keeps the other person up, someone eventually moves to the guest room, and it gets framed as a compromise couples quietly make to save the relationship.