(05-08-2017, 09:23 AM)Crimson Nape Wrote: Seriously, I don't know if the P-R machines have a ramp feature on the Flex mode to adjust how fast the pressure returns when starting an inhale but I've found, on my Resmed, that it is the difference between a "natural" feeling and an instantaneous blast of pressure. This alone can disturb your sleep. Hopefully, a P-R user will be able to answer this more definitively.
Flex settings of 1, 2, and 3 control how fast the pressure returns to full therapeutic pressure on a PR machine.
There's a big difference between the way EPR on a Resmed feels and how Flex on a PR machine feels. Flex reduces the pressure at the beginning of the exhalation by a
variable amount. Regardless of the Flex setting, the pressure reduction will typically be somewhere between 1 and 2cm of pressure based on the forcefulness of the exhalation: The stronger the exhalation, the more likely the pressure will be reduce by 2 full cm. The speed at which the pressure is dropped is controlled by the Flex setting.
In C-Flex+ and A-Flex, the pressure is increased partway back to the therapeutic setting during the second half of the exhalation. And the pressure is increased the rest of the way at the beginning of the inhalation. The speed at which the pressure increased is controlled by the flex setting.
With both C-Flex+ or A-Flex the higher the setting, the faster the machine will be in dropping the pressure at the beginning of the exhalation and it will be slower it will be increasing the pressure back up to the full pressure setting. A-Flex = 3 would be the closest to the Resmed's "medium inhale" setting. But even so, the Flex feels different than EPR with inhale set to "medium" instead of "fast."
The PR web pages used to have some quality information about how Flex works, complete with good diagrams illustrating the changes in the 3 Flex settings. But they've either removed that info from their web pages or buried it so deep that they might as well have removed it. Hence I can't find a good figure that illustrates it except on links to PR machines on
Supplier #1's website, and my understanding is that I can't make a direct link to an image on
Supplier #1's website here.