About us

Sleep is an essential behaviour that we all engage in. We spend, on average, a third of our lifetime asleep. Furthemore, a large, growing body of evidence shows that insufficient or poor-quality sleep is detrimental to physical and mental health.

The first scientific description of sleep apnea dates to 1976 with Guilleminault and his Stanford team. At this early stage, the authors already understood the importance of respiratory effort. Therefore, they measured the endoesophageal pressure during sleep and showed that sleep apnea involves the diaphragm and not only the upper airways.

Within the University of Liege, the observation and discovery of the epidemiology of sleep apnea began in the early 1990s on the initiative of the pioneering scientific research of Professor Poirrier, who opened the first sleep center within the University Hospital.

The first sleep recordings of patients with sleep apnea showed that these patients breathed through their mouth rather than their noses. Moreover, the opening of the mouth during sleep was associated with an increased respiratory effort, and with snoring. These findings were the outset of the jaw activity – JAWAC.

Supported by two PhD engineering students, they developed the JAWAC, for Jaw Activity. The objective was to develop a light, non-invasive device, made of two magnetic sensors that studies the mouth and jaw during sleep. The Nomics adventure was born.

This was followed by fifteen years of research and development, rich in discoveries and innovations, where the company demonstrated the reliability, sensitivity and specificity of the signal from these sensors compared with the Gold Standard PSG.