| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 工程科學系碩博士班 === 100 === With the development of medical technology, snoring gradually has been attended in recent years. Snoring is usually mistaken for the physiological phenomenon because the body is too tired. Actually, snoring is one of symptoms in obstructive sleep apnea. The obstructive sleep apnea will result in persisting sleepiness in daytime, a lack of concentration, hypertensive crisis, cardiovascular disease and even traffic accidents. These symptoms seem to be unimportant in daily time, but sometimes that are fatal in life.
Present treatments for obstructive sleep apnea include continuous positive air pressure, oral appliances and performing surgery. This thesis focuses on oral appliances. There are more than 20 kinds of oral appliances on the market, but most of them are often not flexible enough to be adjusted to fit these devices to all possible cases. These oral appliances are not ergonomically designed, so patients often feel uncomfortable in using existing produtions.
In order to make users feel more comfortable and improve obstructive sleep apnea effectively, a highly flexible oral appliance has been presented in the study. The oral device uses friction effect to maintain mandibular forward, and ensures that mandibular would not slide back during sleeping. As a result, the conceptual design is developed for reducing intensity of snoring and apnea-hypopnea index. For verifying the appliance is strong enough to prevent mandibular from sliding back, the study uses commonly commercial finite element software ANSYS for analysis.
The results show that friction effect could certainly prevent mandibular from sliding back, but that is not sustainable for those patients with bruxism symptoms. However, patients with bruxism symptoms is adapted for neither oral appliance proposed by this thesis nor others on the market.
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