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American Association for Respiratory Care (AARC)
Continuing Respiratory Care Education Credits (CRCE) available.
This course is designed to provide practical, hands-on training for entry-level personnel in the basics of polysomnography technology.
This course covers:
- The roles, responsibilities, and educational requirements of sleep technologists.
- Techniques for placement of EEG (using the International 10-20 System of electrode placement), non-EEG electrodes, and other ancillary equipment routinely used in sleep diagnostics.
- Procedures and methods for collecting, processing, and documenting information gathered from the sleep history, patient interview, and polysomnographic observations.
- Electrical theory, which includes discussions of signal derivations, voltage, sensitivity, deflection, signal polarity, transducer function, bio-electric potentials, ancillary equipment, AC/DC amplifiers, waveform terminology, filters, sensitivity controls, and time constants.
- Overview of data acquisition, data recording, and various monitoring equipment used in a sleep laboratory setting, including esophageal balloons, pressure transducers, respiratory effort belts, body position monitors, audiovisual equipment, thermistors, thermocouples, CO2 monitors, digital amplifiers, pulse oximeters, and snoring sensors.
- Basic cardiac electrophysiology, ECG electrode placement, basic measurements, and basic interpretation.
- Procedures for ensuring patient safety, including electrical safety, infection control, medication side-effects, fire safety, personal safety, basic and advanced resuscitation procedures, as well as sample emergency response protocols.
- Polysomnograph channel adjustments such as time axis alignment, electrical baselines, single channel calibration, preliminary all-channel calibration, final montage calibration, calibration of DC amplifiers and related equipment, and bio-calibration procedures.
- Under direct supervision of instructors, students will practice EEG and non-EEG electrode placement, and placement of ancillary monitoring equipment. This includes mock patient set-up, patient calibrations, and running a sleep study.
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