Beyond myAir: See What Your ResMed CPAP Actually Records

The Dashboard You See vs. the Data You Have

If you use a ResMed AirSense 10 or 11, you probably check myAir every morning. You open the app, see a score out of 100, glance at your usage hours, and move on. Most days, you feel good about a high score. Some days, you wonder why the number dipped.

Here's the thing: myAir is showing you a sliver of what your machine actually records. Every night, your CPAP captures thousands of data points across dozens of metrics. myAir distills all of that into a single score and a few basic numbers. That's like reading the final score of a basketball game and thinking you watched it.

Your SD card has the full game film. Let's look at what you're missing.

What myAir Actually Shows You

myAir presents four pieces of information each morning:

• Daily score (0 – 100): A proprietary blend of usage, mask fit, events, and mask on/off count
• Usage hours: How long your mask was on
• Events per hour: Your AHI, the number of breathing disruptions per hour
• Mask fit: A basic good/acceptable/poor indicator based on leak levels

That's it. These four data points are all you get. No charts, no event breakdowns, no pressure trends, no respiratory metrics. myAir also provides coaching tips based on your score, but they're generic and repetitive after a few weeks.

For a daily glance, this is fine. But if you want to actually understand your therapy, improve your numbers, or bring meaningful data to a doctor, myAir leaves you in the dark.

What myAir Hides from You

Your ResMed machine records a staggering amount of detail to its SD card. Here's what myAir never shows:

Event Type Breakdown

Your AHI is a single number, but it's made up of very different event types. Understanding the difference matters because the treatment approach changes depending on what's happening:

• Obstructive apneas: Your airway physically collapses. Pressure adjustments can help.
• Central apneas: Your brain pauses the breathing signal. More pressure won't fix this, and may make it worse.
• Hypopneas: Partial airflow reduction. The most common event type for most users.
• RERAs: Subtle disruptions that cause brief arousals.

Knowing that your AHI of 4.0 is mostly central apneas tells a completely different story than an AHI of 4.0 that's mostly obstructive. myAir treats them identically.

Pressure and Leak Charts

Your auto-adjusting machine varies its pressure throughout the night, responding to events and airway changes in real time. The pressure curve reveals patterns you can't see any other way: whether the machine is working hard in the early hours, whether a sudden pressure spike coincides with an event cluster, whether your pressure is consistently hitting the top of its range (a sign you may need a prescription adjustment).

Leak data is equally revealing. A leak chart shows you exactly when your mask seal broke, how long it lasted, and whether it coincided with respiratory events. That 2 AM spike in your AHI? It might trace directly to a leak that started at 1:45 AM when you rolled onto your side.

Respiratory Metrics

Your machine tracks your breathing patterns in detail:

• Respiratory rate: Breaths per minute, tracked continuously through the night
• Tidal volume: How much air you move with each breath
• Minute ventilation: Total air volume per minute (rate times depth)
• Snore index: Detected snoring events and their intensity
• Flow limitation: Subtle airway narrowing that hasn't progressed to an apnea yet

These metrics paint a picture of your breathing quality that goes far beyond "you had X events." Flow limitation, for example, is an early warning sign. Catching rising flow limitation before it becomes elevated AHI lets you act proactively instead of reactively.

Event Timeline

Maybe the most useful thing myAir hides: when your events happened. Your SD card records every respiratory event with its exact timestamp and duration. This reveals clustering patterns. Were your events spread evenly through the night, or did 80% of them happen in a single hour? Did they correlate with a positional change? Did they cluster during what was likely REM sleep in the early morning hours?

This temporal information is clinically valuable. Your sleep doctor can use event timing to make targeted adjustments rather than broad changes.

The myAir Score Problem

The myAir scoring system has a fundamental flaw: you can score 100/100 with an AHI of 4.9. That's technically "normal" (under 5), but it's borderline. Many well-treated patients achieve an AHI under 2. An AHI of 4.9 means you're experiencing nearly five breathing disruptions every hour, roughly one every twelve minutes.

The scoring system also weights usage heavily. Sleep for seven hours with mediocre therapy quality and you'll outscore someone who slept six hours with excellent control. The score rewards compliance over effectiveness.

This creates a false sense of security. Users see 95 or 100 and assume everything is perfect. Meanwhile, their detailed data might reveal a mask leak pattern that's undermining therapy for two hours every night, or a rising trend in central apneas that deserves medical attention. The score says "great." The data says "let's take a closer look."

What Your SD Card Actually Contains

Your ResMed SD card stores data in EDF (European Data Format), a medical standard used across sleep medicine. Here's what's inside, organized by file type:

Session data (PLD files): Per-second recordings of mask pressure, therapy pressure, EPR pressure, leak rate, respiratory rate, tidal volume, minute ventilation, snore index, and flow limitation. This is the raw time-series data that powers detailed charts.

Event annotations (EVE files): Every respiratory event your machine detected, stamped with the exact start time, duration, and classification (obstructive apnea, central apnea, hypopnea, or RERA).

High-resolution flow data (BRP files): Breath-by-breath airflow waveforms at 25 samples per second. This is the highest-resolution data your machine records.

Daily summaries (STR.edf): A single file containing daily totals for every metric, going back over a year. This is where long-term trend analysis comes from: AHI averages, leak percentiles, pressure ranges, and usage statistics for every single day.

Oximetry data (SA2 files): If you have an oximeter connected, your blood oxygen levels and pulse rate are recorded here.

All together, a single night of data contains thousands of individual measurements. A month of data contains tens of thousands. myAir summarizes all of this into one number between 0 and 100.

How to Access the Full Picture with CPAP Clarity

Getting from your SD card to a full analysis takes about 60 seconds:

1. Remove your SD card. On the AirSense 11 (opens in new tab), open the small door on the left side and push to eject. On the AirSense 10, it's on the back panel.

2. Connect it to your computer. Use your laptop's built-in reader or a USB SD card reader (opens in new tab).

3. Open cpapclarity.com and drag in your data. Drop your SD card's DATALOG folder onto the import area. Processing takes a few seconds.

4. Explore your dashboard. You'll see your AHI broken down by event type, stat cards for every metric with color-coded health indicators, time-series charts showing your entire night, and plain-English insights explaining what your data means. For a full walkthrough, see our how-to guide.

5. Download a report. Generate a detailed PDF for your records or your next doctor appointment. Your sleep physician will appreciate the event breakdown and pressure data.

Your data never leaves your device. There's no account to create, no cloud upload, no server that touches your health information. Everything runs in your browser.

Feature Comparison: myAir vs. CPAP Clarity

Feature	myAir	CPAP Clarity
Price	Free	Free
AHI number	Yes	Yes
AHI by event type	No	Yes
Event timeline	No	Yes
Leak rate charts	No	Yes
Pressure charts	No	Yes
Respiratory rate	No	Yes
Tidal volume	No	Yes
Flow limitation	No	Yes
Smart insights	Generic tips	Personalized to your data
PDF reports	No	Yes
Multi-night trends	Limited	Yes, with therapy score
Privacy	Cloud (ResMed servers)	100% local (browser only)
Account required	Yes	No
Works on phone	App only	Any browser

Can You Use Both? (Yes, and You Should)

myAir and CPAP Clarity serve different purposes, and they complement each other well.

Use myAir for your daily check-in. It syncs automatically, it's convenient, and it confirms your machine is working. The daily score is a quick pulse check that takes five seconds.

Use CPAP Clarity for the real analysis. When you want to understand a bad night, track trends over weeks, prepare for a doctor visit, or investigate why your AHI is creeping upward, pull your SD card and see the full data. The event breakdown alone is worth the 60 seconds it takes.

Think of myAir as the speedometer in your car. It tells you how fast you're going right now. CPAP Clarity is the diagnostic computer that shows engine performance, fuel efficiency, tire pressure, and maintenance history. You check the speedometer every day. You plug in the diagnostic tool when you want the complete picture.

See What You've Been Missing

If you've been relying on myAir alone, you've been making decisions about your therapy based on roughly 5% of your available data. The other 95% is sitting on a tiny SD card inside your machine, waiting.

Pull the card. Drop it in. In about a minute, you'll see your CPAP data the way it was meant to be seen: detailed, visual, and understandable.

Try CPAP Clarity free, no account needed →