Sleeping on your side is only a treatment for mild apnea anyways – more serious cases require some sort of airway support (the CPAP machine does this with positive airway pressure). If your apnea is mild enough to be treated merely by side-sleeping, and you don’t have bursitis, the tennis-ball trick is pretty darn cheap and much less creepy. More visible but still much simpler than a robot is sleeping with a body pillow or two to keep you on your side. The body pillow routine might be better for you too – providing better body support so less likely for you to give yourself bursitis or back problems.

I wonder how useful it is if you stay on your side all night though? I think I’ve trained my body to do so quite well, but still have big apnea problems.

Of course, as usual it does no good if it costs $4000 to those of us with no income who can’t get their apnea treated.

I personally can’t sleep on my side, even though that’s recommended for sleep apnea, because I have other issues, spinal and otherwise, which require me to lie on my back. (I also have to balance out my acid reflux–vomiting bile into your sleep snorkel’s tube is ….well, unpleasant to say the least.)  The CPAP machine allows me lie on my back, it doesn’t let the apnea happen to start with, and it doesn’t wake me up or force me to adjust. (I do occasionally have aerophagia if I don’t put my jaw strap on tight enough–so THAT can be an issue, alas.)

Neat idea though, and certainly a creative,  if not truly preventative approach.