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Advances in sleep technology are transforming how neurologists identify and manage obstructive sleep apnea, a condition that affects up to 70% of patients with certain neurologic disorders and can negatively impact cognitive and neurologic outcomes if left untreated. In this episode, Dr. Joyce Lee-Iannotti discusses the growing role of wearable and nearable sleep-monitoring devices, when home sleep studies are appropriate, and how emerging technologies are expanding access to diagnosis and treatment. Learn practical strategies for screening patients, interpreting sleep data, and partnering with sleep specialists to improve long-term neurologic health through better sleep.
In this episode, Casey S. Albin, MD, FAAN, speaks with Joyce K. Lee-Iannotti, MD, FAAN, FAASM, author of the article "Sleep Diagnostics and Monitoring Technology in Obstructive Sleep Apnea" in the Continuum® August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue.
Dr. Albin is a Continuum® Audio interviewer, associate editor of media engagement, and an assistant professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dr. Lee-Iannotti is a Professor of Neurology at the Barrow Neurological Institute, University of Arizona College of Medicine, and Creighton School of Medicine in Phoenix, Arizona.
Additional Resources
Read the article: Sleep Diagnostics and Monitoring Technology in Obstructive Sleep Apnea
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Social Media
Host: @caseyalbin
Guest: @jleeiannotti
Full episode transcript available here
Dr Albin: Through the neurology of sleep issue, I think we have all been convinced that we all need better sleep, both for ourselves and for our patients. And fortunately, there is an abundance of new technology that can enable us to diagnose sleep problems, and then also make sure that our patients are getting the rest that's going to give them the best chance at a good cognitive recovery, and improve their cognitive function even if they are not currently suffering from a neurologic condition. Today, I am so excited to dive deeper into this topic.
Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast.
Dr Albin: Hello, this is Dr. Casey Albin. Today I'm interviewing Dr. Joyce Lee-Iannotti about her article on sleep diagnostics and monitoring technology in obstructive sleep apnea. This article appears in the August 2026 Continuum issue on neurology of sleep. Welcome to the podcast, I'd love to just start by having you introduce yourself to our audience.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Albin. I'm Joyce Lee-Iannotti. I'm a professor of neurology at Barrow Neurological Institute. I am boarded in general neurology, stroke, and sleep, but I spend most of my time in the sleep world, so I jokingly say that I get more sleep doing sleep than I certainly did in stroke.
Dr Albin: Absolutely. I mean, wow, what a fascinating career, and I suspect that we're actually gonna get to some of how all of those pathophysiologies might overlap in the world of sleep. But you had the really exciting task of trying to distill this exciting, rapidly evolving field of sleep diagnostics, and I suspect it's relevant to many of the patients who end up in the neurology clinic, and I suspect that it's actually pretty relevant to many of our listeners who themselves might actually be wearing sleep tracking devices. And all of us probably wonder, well, how can we use that data to improve our own cognitive function and certainly make our patient's life even better? Before we even get into some of the meat and potatoes of this, I thought it would be really helpful for us to define some terms that come up in your article, one of which is wearables. We might figure that out, but the other is nearable. Walk us through what's a wearable, what's a nearable, how are they different?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: I'm happy to do that. First of all, the article is entitled Sleep Diagnostics and Monitoring Technology, and this was a super fun article for me to write because it's very practical, and it's generalizable to everybody. So, I'm going to start with a wearable, and a wearable is really a device that is simply worn on the body. And we're all familiar with wearables like smart watches, they're rings, they're patches, they're headbands, and the most validated form of a wearable that you've probably heard about is actigraphy, which we use in the sleep clinic.
Dr Albin: Tell us a little bit more. So, what is actigraphy? I've heard the word before, but don't actually know what it means.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Actigraphy has been a tool that we've used in the sleep clinic for a really long time. Traditionally, we used it to monitor circadian rhythm patterns in people who are night owls or morning larks. And then more currently, we actually use it to track sleep patterns in people with suspected narcolepsy. So, before they come in for a sleep study, we actually have them wear an actigraphy for about a week just to get a sense of their sleep duration and their circadian pattern.
Dr Albin: Got it. And what is it monitoring? Our movement or the patterns that we may or may not make?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: It's really based on movement. You're exactly right.
Dr Albin: Cool. Okay, so most of this is based on gold standard monitoring with actigraphy. What other things can be incorporated into these wearable devices?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yeah, the technology is really advanced, and every day it changes, which is super exciting. So, on top of movement, these wearables can look at temperature. They can look at even EEG, like limited EEG, heart rate variability, and a really big word that we like to use in sleep technology, which is PPG, or photoplethysmography data, and that's really looking at heart rate variability and oxygenation, saturations, and following those levels as well.
Dr Albin: Wow, so you basically can get most of the data that you might have historically needed to go to a sleep lab to get.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Most of them. They're still a surrogate. You'll hear me emphasize in the article as well that the gold standard remains the in-lab polysomnogram, but these are good surrogate markers that patients can wear long term to look at trends and patterns.
Dr Albin: Absolutely. And we're gonna unpack a little bit about who specifically those are best for and, really what it gives you in the clinic. But before we jump into that, what's a nearable, and how is that different?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yeah. Nearables are really exciting too. So, these are devices that monitor sleep but don't require direct contact on the body. So, these are devices that our patients will use, but it'll be at the bedside table. They're devices that actually go underneath the mattress, or they can be in, like, the ambient environment to detect sleep patterns.
Dr Albin: Oh my gosh. How is it doing that if it's not actually something you're wearing?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: I know. It seems a little Big Brother-ish, doesn't it?
Dr Albin: Yes.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: So, they use a technology called radio frequency signals, sometimes radar, sometimes sonar, pressure sensors, even microphones, and they're picking up things like respiration, movement, snoring, and that's how they can decipher sleep patterns.
Dr Albin: Crazy. I mean, I guess the benefit of that is that it's less disruptive to the user 'cause it's not actually on them and having contact with them, and I suspect there's probably some downsides in terms of just it's a more limited data set you're getting.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Absolutely. Yeah, you're exactly right. It's more convenient because it's not touching them, so, in theory, they're gonna sleep more comfortably. But I would like to think that the most validated forms of devices that we use to track sleep have to have some form of contact with the body, and this technology is new and probably needs a few layers of more sophistication to be as accurate as the wearables.
Dr Albin: Absolutely. I feel like we're going to have this conversation in five, maybe even less than that, years, and this data will have become like, oh, we all have something in our room that's monitoring everything. The world is crazy. All right. One of the places where your article really stood out to me is that sleep diagnostics have really taken off, particularly when we're thinking about obstructive sleep apnea. And I think we all might sort of scratch our heads and be like, "This is a neurology podcast. Why should I, as a neurologist, care about obstructive sleep apnea?" But I think you laid out a very convincing argument in the article. Walk us through why we should care about this.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Absolutely. So, for neurologists, sleep matters, and I hope that my article translates that. Obstructive sleep apnea, which I'm gonna call OSA, is incredibly common in all of our neurologic patients, whether you see epilepsy, Parkinson's, stroke, Alzheimer's, neuromuscular, or even chronic headache patients. The prevalence of sleep apnea is as high as 70% in these patients.
Dr Albin: Wow. That's incredible. That is an incredibly high number.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: And if I can add, Dr. Albin, there's growing literature in multiple studies across the literature that show that untreated sleep apnea negatively impacts neurologic outcomes in our patients. So, it is really important to ask the question about sleep, and if the red flags pop up, to then screen for sleep apnea in particular.
Dr Albin: I think that that's a great point for us to drill down on, and obviously you're a sleep neurologist. You're very used to screening people in the clinic. But say someone comes in, and I'm gonna have you put your former stroke hat on, and say someone comes into the stroke clinic, and you're just making sure that they're optimized on their aspirin or dual antiplatelet therapy, and you're doing secondary risk modification. How would screening for OSA fit into that?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: It would be a part of that screening process to look at preventative ways to prevent strokes, whether it be primary or secondary prevention. So, we did a survey a while back, and it actually showed that 17% of stroke neurologists are screening for sleep apnea. It has quadrupled, fortunately, in the last few years due to public awareness and a lot of education that the AAN has done, in fact. So, at this point, I would say not asking about sleep apnea to a stroke patient is similar to not asking about diabetes.
Dr Albin: So, we really have to be cognizant and conscious about saying, you know, "Do you snore at night? Do you have episodes of apnea, or does someone witness you stop?" Are there things that you ask that maybe I wouldn't be aware and thinking of?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Those are the right questions, and then very practically, very easy questionnaires to implement that literally take a minute that your nurses or medical assistants can administer to the patient, and the most commonly one that is used in stroke patients is called the STOP BANG, S-T-O-P B-A-N-G, which is a validated questionnaire to screen for symptoms.
Dr Albin: Absolutely. So okay, so this is easy to do. We should all be doing this. If you're not, now's the time. And I suspect if they screen positive, next steps, it can be hard to get into a sleep lab, and we're gonna talk about some workarounds, but I think some of our listeners may never have spent time in the actual sleep lab. So, let's say you refer a patient and you actually can get them in for a gold standard in-lab sleep study. What's gonna happen in that sleep study?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yeah. And I just want to preface this by saying that my article hopefully highlights that we've come a long way where we understand that there are many neurologic populations then that can undergo home ambulatory sleep studies with just as much accuracy as an in-lab polysomnogram. But with that, I wanna say an in-lab polysomnogram is actually a highly sophisticated physiologic recording overnight, typically, unless somebody is a day sleeper. So, if I could take a minute to kinda describe the data that we're monitoring throughout the night. There is a limited EEG. We concentrate on frontal, central, occipital leads to look at sleep staging. We have eye leads. We have EMG leads on the chin and the leg. We look at EKG, flow monitors, belt, and then we also do pulse oximetry, snoring mics, and even body position sensors. So, a lot is going on.
Dr Albin: This is incredible. Yeah, it truly is. I mean, this is like... I'm a neurointensivist, and so I think that you have just really outdone what I consider multimodal monitoring in your sleep study patients. I'm not even sure our neuro ICU patients accumulate that much data. All right, so tell me, they go through, and they can get this. But like you said, there's actually a lot of data that you've presented that, you know, not everyone needs to go to the in-lab sleep study. So how do you decide who actually needs to be in a sleep lab versus who can do this at home? And then how do you set them up with getting this done at home?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yeah. The home sleep studies are really more accessible ways for us to assess for sleep apnea in our neurologic patients, especially patients who live in very rural areas and don't have access or have very long wait times for an in-lab polysomnogram. With that being said, though, Dr. Albin, I will say that there are a subset of patients who have to go into the lab, and those are patients where you suspect a sleep disorder other than obstructive sleep apnea, so like parasomnias or central sleep apnea, patients with severe cognitive or physical debilitation, like our stroke patients who are hemiplegic and won't be able to apply the home sleep study. But for the most part, I do feel like a home sleep study is a good beginner study to screen the patient. And if there are red flags, then you can always get the in-lab afterwards.
Dr Albin: That's super helpful. And just from a pragmatic standpoint, will insurance cover the home sleep study?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: They will, yes, and it's all about documenting. So, if I could get really practical, for neurologists, it really just requires documenting snoring, for one, whether it's noted by the patient or by their bed partner, and then any form of hypersomnia, which is daytime sleepiness or even a sense of fatigue, having low energy or napping during the day.
Dr Albin: I suspect so many of our patients meet those criterias. That seems, like, wildly simple to do.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yes. And if you wanna be the favorite referral person to your sleep neurologist or your sleep specialist, then take another step and do that STOP-Bang. And if you record a score greater than three, that automatically gets them at least a home sleep study.
Dr Albin: It's amazing. And then when you get this data, again, this is really practical, pragmatic stuff, how do you get the report? Does it integrate in your electronic medical record? Does the patient bring it in? How do you get that data back?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yeah, so this is where technology is amazing, Dr. Albin. Now we have disposable devices. Sometimes they sync to the WatchPat, or the greater Wi-Fi. So we can get them all through password-protected internet forums that transmits the data, so sometimes the patients don't even have to come back to give us the data. And then we have different forms where we can actually relay the results as well, either through the electronic medical record or through systems themselves to relay those results directly to the patient.
Dr Albin: Yeah, and your article really laid out in beautiful tables, like, all the different devices that are available to patients, and it's honestly mind-blowing how many of these companies and devices exist. So, seems like the world is your oyster in terms of picking from them.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Absolutely. I think there's... The last time I counted, there was over 20 different home sleep study devices for obstructive sleep apnea. And it's a great thing to have, but sometimes too many choices can be a little bit confusing. So that's where I do say partner with your sleep specialist close by, and they will find the right type of home sleep study device for your particular patient.
Dr Albin: Drilling down a little further, let's say your patient does get diagnosed with OSA. One of the things that really stuck out to me is that there's a whole range of now devices that are new that make this treatment easy so that we can actually prevent and treat neurological conditions by just improving patient sleep. So, walk us through a little bit about how that landscape has changed.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Sure. And I'll start with the gold standard of treatment, which is still CPAP, which is continuous positive airway pressure. Not only can we monitor the pressure, look at adherence, change the humidification for the patient all remotely through, again, password-protected internet forums, but we can even change the pressure with patients 300-plus miles away.
Dr Albin: Wow.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: It's really cool, right? It prevents patients, especially with significant neurologic debilitation, from having to come into the office for adjustments. The other thing I wanted to mention, Dr. Albin, is for patients, a lot of patients like positive feedback on a daily basis. And a lot of these companies, if you are on CPAP, have come up with a smartphone app that you can look at how many hours you used your CPAP device. They give you a score, and they even tell you how many times you had stoppage of breathing that night.
Dr Albin: I think that this is what's really exciting about where we are in neurology and, like, neurologic care, is we have gotten so much better at getting patients their own data and allowing people to really see that data, integrate lifestyle changes, and see how it impacts them. And that positive feedback loop, I think, is a really powerful tool for our patients to say, "Look, this makes me better," or, "Oh, this makes me worse." I'm just really excited by how much data we can give directly to our patients.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: I agree. It's so empowering. You know, as a CPAP user myself, you want that positive affirmation that all of your efforts at night and cleaning your mask and your machine paid off, and everybody likes to see an A+ on their report card.
Dr Albin: I love that. Now I'm going to ask you on the flip side, I imagine, and I myself am a sleep tracker, like I have my little device and I look at, you know, the score in the morning and I kind of perseverate on like what makes it better, what makes it worse, and I can imagine that sometimes in sleep clinic, people are coming in to you and they have just pages and pages and, you know, they're flipping through all their data from the last year. And I imagine that's pretty overwhelming when you have just the insane amount of data that these devices can generate. So, from another pragmatic, practical standpoint, how are you integrating all that data when someone comes in for a sleep visit?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: I love that question. So first of all, I will say myself, and I think a lot of my sleep colleagues, we love objective data, right? Because it's something that we can see. We can see whether it matches their subject's symptoms. Sometimes it can be a lot of reassurance that, "Look, you actually got more sleep than you thought you did." But sometimes patients will bring in like a month's worth, and that's really hard to analyze, you know, in a 30 or 60-minute visit. So oftentimes what I do is I look at like the last week or last two weeks, and I look at trends. And I think a lot of the apps for whatever device you decide to use have done a really good job in terms of visual graphics to show how much sleep on average you're getting, how much deep sleep or REM sleep or wake-up times that you have. So, I, again, I feel like the technology has really helped us consolidate a lot of data, but also be efficient with the messaging that we relay to our patients.
Dr Albin: Absolutely. And I know personally, at least for the sleep tracker I wear, it also allows you to diary. So, you can say like, "Oh, last night I had a glass of wine," or, "Yesterday I had a really hard workout," or, "I stayed out late with friends," or, "I was on call." Turns out call is really, really bad for my sleep. But it does allow you to sort of track what behaviors, and I wonder how much of that informs what you're counseling patients to do in terms of trying to notice the things that either improve their sleep performance or their subjective feeling of restlessness or restfulness, and how all of that plays into what you're doing in the clinic.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: I love all of those comments. It is validation for the patient. Again, it's empowering for them to look at, what did I do last night to get more REM sleep than the night prior? I want to mention that the best people who do this so well are professional athletes, and they look at, how am I going to cater my day to make sure that I'm sleeping well, that I reduce my risk of injury and concussion and increase my reaction time? And I feel like all of us should do that. That's such a great philosophy, to analyze how we can do things better.
Dr Albin: I love that. This whole issue, but this article in particular, really emphasized to me that sleep, again, it's not a passive time that we're taking a nap. It's a really active form of sort of neurologic healing. There's important removal of toxins through the lymphatics. And like there's a lot happening in sleep, and there are so many more tools that allow us to unpack that sort of peak performance of sleep, which again, sort of is that athletic mentality of like, how can I make this better? Not just to treat a neurologic condition, but also really importantly, to prevent one.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: I often refer to sleep as icing on the cake. With our patients, when you're doing everything right, for example, a multiple sclerosis patient, they're on the right medications, they are exercising, they're participating in rehab, their mood is good, but they're just not getting to the quality-of-life metric that they want to be, it usually is sleep. And if you can add that as a neurologist to your piece of the algorithm to help your patient, it really does improve their quality of life and ultimately their neurologic outcome. I'm a true believer of that.
Dr Albin: I was a true believer. I've been made even more of a true believer through your article and getting to talk to you. I always like to close by asking the person I'm interviewing, what's one really exciting thing in this field? What are you kind of most looking forward to as you think about sleep medicine and its impact in neurology in the next five or 10 years?
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Oh, I love that question, too. So, the thing I'm most excited about in the field of sleep, and specifically sleep neurology, is the power of preventative care. When I did a lot of stroke, I would see young people, older people, healthy people, people with a lot of genetic risk factors come in, and one minute they were totally normal. The second minute, they're paralyzed and can't speak. And for a lot of these patients, I would ask, "Why am I seeing you now? Why couldn't I have seen you 10 years earlier, worked on risk factors, and prevented this outcome?" And I truly believe that is exactly where sleep lies. If you work on sleep, whether you're an adolescent, 20 year old, 30, et cetera, you are ultimately going to prevent horrible cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, neurologic diseases in the long run.
Dr Albin: So important. I really want to direct our listeners back to your article because all of the articles are really practical, but this one in particular looks at how do you do this? What are your options? How do you get this to patients? It really is sort of a step-by-step guidebook on like, A, why this is important, how you should screen, what you should do if someone screens positive for needing to have a sleep study.There's so much more technology that allows really anyone anywhere to have access to the testing that they need to get the right diagnosis, to improve their sleep, to improve their cognitive outcomes, to improve their neurologic health. It's pretty amazing.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: It is amazing. And in the article, I do allude to certain devices and then websites that are very helpful. If I can announce, Dr. Albin, I'm super excited about this. Through work with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, endorsement with the AAN, we are coming out with a new clinical guideline specifically on home sleep study devices and looking at the validation studies. So, I think that's going to be very helpful. But I hope that everybody after listening to this picks up the phone, call your friendly sleep specialist, and align with them and partner with them. And this will ultimately help your patients, I guarantee it.
Dr Albin: Again, today I've been interviewing Dr. Joyce Lee-Iannotti about her article on sleep diagnostics and monitoring technology in obstructive sleep apnea. This article appears in the August 2026 Continuum issue on Neurology of Sleep. Be sure to check out Continuum Audio episodes from this and other issues. And thank you to our listeners, and thank you, Dr. Lee-Iannotti, for joining us today.
Dr Lee-Iannotti: Thank you.
Dr Monteith: This is Dr. Teshamae Monteith, Associate Editor of Continuum Audio. If you've enjoyed this episode, you'll love the journal, which is full of in-depth and clinically relevant information important for neurology practitioners. Use the link in the episode notes to learn more and subscribe. AAN members, you can get CME for listening to this interview by completing the evaluation at continpub.com/audiocme. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio.
