There is a patent which came out a couple years ago which is supposed to enhance the comfort and health of people with sleep apnea.  Sleep apnea is a disorder in which a person stops breathing or partly stops breathing during sleep.  Reports suggest that people with this disorder may have as many as 300 episodes of this per night, which causes them to lose sleep, literally.  This is greatly uncomfortable, as anyone who has woken up in the middle of the night unable to catch their breath knows!  And so there are several inventions and medications out which are supposed to help alleviate this problem.  I was looking at this patent information about one of them, which seems to be a nice product.  It isn’t as bulky or uncomfortable as the earlier version were, but it serves essentially the same function.  On top of that, it works on batteries, so you don’t have to stay near a power plug in order to run the thing. If anyone who reads this has ever used on, I’d be interested to hear how you liked it!

What is a respirator and what does it do? I wanted to find out the answer to this question, so I turned to a couple of sources to figure it out.  The most common use for respirators is for people in the situation that some material in the air around them is dangerous for them.  This can be anything from dust for people with lung diseases to gas masks for people in war.  In the medical world, certain kinds of respirators are used to protect health care workers from contracting diseases like TB or SARS a few years ago.  In all these cases, there’s a need to filter out the dangerous part of the air.  A couple years ago, there was a resurgence of interest in respirators in public places and businesses, but most places don’t really need them.  They are much more useful in the protection of doctors and nurses exposed to certain diseases.  This article goes into depth about how workers in a facility can protect themselves by using respirators.