What you are missing, possibly, is what I was missing. I didn't know I had severe OSA until my cardiologist sent me to various imaging facilities, and finally to a sleep lab when none of them showed any abnormalities or ischemia. The polysomnography showed I had severe obstructive sleep apnea, and THAT is what caused my atrial fibrillation.
Disrupted sleep, for any reason, is poor sleep...hardly sleep at all. Each time you have an event, whether merely a RERA (respiration effort related arousal), a flow limitation, or an outright obstructive event, and it lasts for more than 10 seconds, your machine will duly note it and it will become part of the record next morning. To that end, if you ever find yourself using a RESMED again, consider going to apneaboard.com and downloading the (safe, constantly improved) freeware called 'OSCAR'. It will allow you to remove the SD card from your PAP machine, insert it into a slot/reader/ and OSCAR will look for it and ask if it can download the data (you'll have to create an account in OSCAR first). You're an engineer, you're used to reading data and making sense of it, and you use graphic depictions for their value as well. OSCAR offers all of that, and then some. You'll find it interesting from its rendering of your recorded data and maybe be able to adjust your machine's settings to get AHI (apnea/hypopnea index) as low as mine, which is an enviable 0.6 average, week-to-week, month-to-month, now running on 7 years.
Eureka! (Or any similar Greek exclamation) . My sleep guy was saying lots of OSA and hypopnea and I should do a bi-level. Looking at my O2 aided sleep I did not see it and questioned the OSA diagnosis.
In my rush to get to a "cheap" (its the engineer in me) but effective (my blood O2 looks great) result, I feared I was missing some essentials of the process!
I did join the Apnea Board a while back and am familiar with the Oscar software so will certainly use it if I wind up with Resmed (bi-level or ASV or "whatever") .
Your help has been what I neede to help my understanding.
Thanks a bunch.
Regards