AirwayAware

Where is your tongue right now? It can affect your sleep and cause snoring. AirwayAware, by an implantologist of 28 years, decodes the hidden secrets of better sleep and health no one ever told you.

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Where is your tongue right now?

Most people have never been asked that question. I ask it every day, in my dental chair, and the answer changes lives.

I am Dr. Kedar Bakshi, an implantologist with 29 years in clinical practice at Sai Smile Dental Care, Vasai East, near Mumbai, India.

B.D.S. (Mumbai) · Post Graduate Diploma in Orthodontics (USC, Spain) · Fellow and Diplomate in Implantology: F.I.S.O.I. (ISOI, India), F.I.C.O.I. and D.I.C.O.I. (ICOI, USA) · Curriculum Implantology for MSc in Implantology (DGI, Germany) · Diplomate in Orthodontics (DOWI, Spain).

I place implants, I do surgeries, I see patients from morning to night. I hold India's first implant design patent. I invented OsseoSure, a piston-driven mechanical osteotome system for implant surgery. And I hold India's first oral appliance patent for sleep apnoea.

For years I have watched the same story walk into my clinic. A tongue that lies low. A mouth that stays open at night. A narrow jaw, a crowded bite, a tired face. Snoring that the family laughs about. A child called "hyperactive" who is actually fighting sleep because he cannot breathe properly at night. An adult told only to lose weight. Nobody connected the dots for them. AirwayAware connects the dots.

Where AirwayAware stands today

  • iPhone 1.0: live on the App Store since 30 September 2026.
  • iPhone 1.1: in App Review (submitted 1 October): the night recording, the Night Player, the detailed night report with Share as PDF, and breathing practice with the oximeter. It goes live automatically when Apple approves it.
  • Android: ready. Every 1.1 feature runs on Android today. Google Play is next, with the RevenueCat SDK.
  • Website and web app: live at https://airwayaware.app. The check, the lessons, the exercises and breathing practice in any browser.
  • One subscription, every screen, powered by RevenueCat. Premium is one RevenueCat entitlement. With iPhone 1.2, a subscriber opens it on the web with a short code from the app, at no extra cost. Next, people will be able to subscribe on the web directly.
  • Patients of a clinic open everything, in the app and on the web, with a personal link from their own doctor (Six Figures).

Inspiration

The mouth is the front door of the airway. The dentist is the one professional who looks inside that door every single day. Yet most people with snoring and disturbed sleep never meet anyone who reads their tongue, their palate, their bite and their breathing together.

I have one simple idea at the centre of my work: one tongue, three jobs. When the whole tongue rests against the palate, it seals the mouth so you breathe through the nose, it keeps the airway open, and it helps balance the head over the spine. Lose that one posture and all three jobs fail together. Cause becomes effect, and every effect becomes a new cause: mouth breathing, low tongue, tongue thrust, a narrowing airway, snoring, broken sleep, a tired body.

I wanted to put this understanding into the hands of anyone with a phone. I had wanted to do it for many years. Shipaton gave me the reason to do it now.

What it does

AirwayAware is a screening and teaching app, built in my own voice.

  • It starts with one question: "Where is your tongue right now?" Most people realise, in that second, that they have never thought about it.
  • A free 12-question airway check drawn from the signs I look for as a clinician: how you breathe by day, what happens at night, how your jaw and tongue sit, how you wake up. You get a score, a band, and a clear explanation of what each answer means.
  • A full 54-question check for premium members, with a report in five steps: the probable issue, the core cause, what you can safely do, the advanced tests worth considering, and when to see a specialist.
  • 24 narrated video lessons in my own voice, and 16 illustrated articles: why the airway narrows, what mouth breathing does over the years, how tongue posture shapes the face, why some people wake up tired however long they sleep.
  • Safe daily exercises: tongue to the palate, lip seal, slow nostril breathing, gentle throat work.
  • A Night tab to close the day: bedtime audio that keeps playing after you lock the phone.
  • Complete privacy. No account. No login. No advertising. Your answers, your nights and your breathing sessions never leave your phone unless you share them yourself.

AirwayAware screens. It never diagnoses. It sends the right person to the right test, sooner.

New in version 1.1 (submitted to the App Store, running on Android today)

1. Record your night

Put the phone beside your pillow, on its charger, and tap Start. The microphone measures sound every second all night, with the phone locked, and recognises snoring from its rhythm. Connect an everyday Bluetooth finger pulse oximeter and the app adds oxygen (SpO2), pulse and the finger signal strength (perfusion index) on the same clock. If the oximeter drops in the night (finger out, bathroom), it reconnects by itself. A new oximeter sets itself up on the phone in about thirty seconds. A few taps before sleep (how your day was, how tired you are, a late dinner, alcohol or coffee, a blocked nose, the side you sleep on) and a few in the morning (how you feel, a headache or a dry mouth, how long you took to fall asleep) are set beside the night.

2. The Night Player

In the morning, replay your night second by second, on a calm dark screen like a clinical monitor: the clock, oxygen, pulse, perfusion and sound level together, with a label for each moment (SNORING, QUIET, NO SOUND DATA). A map of the whole night and a 2-minute close-up; tap anywhere to jump there. Previous and next event buttons, speeds of 1×, 2×, 10× and 60×. Mark this moment: "Me snoring", "Someone else", "Not snoring (noise)", "Movement", "I was awake", or your own note. If your partner was the one snoring, you can say so.

This is exactly the same Night Player a doctor sees in Six Figures, my practice software. The patient and the doctor read the same night, the same way.

3. A detailed night report, in plain words

Not a graph you cannot read, but sentences you can:

  • The night in one sentence. For example: "Oxygen dipped again and again from 02:11 to 02:35: 12 dips in 25 minutes, down to 80%."
  • Six numbers: oxygen (median), lowest oxygen, dips of 3% or more per hour, pulse (median), minutes of snoring and their share of the night, and silences after snoring in which oxygen fell.
  • What stands out, numbered and coloured: clusters of dips (the densest 30 minutes, because an average hides them), and whether each dip came during snoring, just after snoring stopped, or in a quiet stretch.
  • Worth listening to: up to four moments of the night. Tap one and hear it: the snoring just before the oxygen fell.
  • How complete the night was: how many hours of sound and of oxygen were actually recorded, and when the finger signal was too weak to trust.
  • Compared with the night before: a calmer night, or a harder one, only when the numbers clearly say so.
  • How it counts: a dip is a fall of 3% or more below your own level of the previous 100 seconds; readings with a weak finger signal are left out. Fixed, published rules. No AI guesses about your health.

4. Share as PDF, with any doctor

One tap makes an A4 report: the whole night on one chart, the six numbers, what stands out, close-up charts of the moments worth listening to, your evening and morning answers, and your own marks. Send it by WhatsApp or email to any doctor. It is made on the phone.

5. Breathing practice with the oximeter

The finger oximeter does more than oxygen. From its pulse wave, the app finds every single heartbeat, live, and calculates:

  • Oxygen (SpO2) and pulse, second by second.
  • Heart-rate variability (HRV), as RMSSD in milliseconds: how much the time between heartbeats varies. Higher usually means a calmer nervous system.
  • Breaths a minute, read from the heart itself: the heart speeds up a little on every breath in and slows on every breath out (respiratory sinus arrhythmia).
  • The heart's swing, breath by breath (HRV·SWING): how far the pulse rises and falls within each breath. At your best slow pace this swing is as big as it gets, and "Find my best pace" uses it to find your own resonance pace.
  • Stressed or relaxed: Baevsky's Stress Index (SI). It is calculated from the spread of the beat-to-beat intervals over the last one to two minutes, and shown in plain words: relaxed, settling, tense or stressed.
  • Before and after: 30 seconds of quiet breathing before the practice and 60 seconds after. The app shows pulse, HRV, breaths a minute and the stress index before → after, so you see what ten minutes of slow breathing did to your own body.

The practice itself: the app first measures your own comfortable slow breath from a few taps, then guides you with a soft buzz at each breath out (or you lead and it follows). It measures breath reach in finger-widths, the old yogic measure of how far the out-breath travels from the nose; the aim is three fingers, a breath so quiet it is barely felt. Safety first: a safety card before any breath pause, and with the oximeter on, the app stops a pause by itself if oxygen goes below 94%, falls by 3 points, the pulse rises by 20, or the signal is lost. My practice keeps every session and shows your trend over the weeks.

For practice and relaxation. Not a medical test.

The website and web app: https://airwayaware.app

AirwayAware now lives in the browser too, on any computer or phone. No download, no account.

  • The free 12-question airway check, with exactly the same questions, scoring and bands as the app: your score, your band, a red-flag warning where it matters, and what each answer means.
  • Every lesson, article and common question has its own page: the 24 narrated videos, the 16 illustrated articles, and the questions people ask, each written out in full so anyone can read it and find it.
  • The exercises, step by step, each with the video it needs.
  • Breathing practice in the browser, for members. In Chrome on Android, Windows or Mac, a Bluetooth finger oximeter connects straight to the web page: oxygen, pulse, heart-rate variability and the stress index, with the same safety guard as the app. (iPhone browsers have no Bluetooth; there, the guided breathing works without the oximeter.)
  • The Night page explains the night recording and the Night Player; the recording itself happens in the app, beside the pillow.
  • One content file feeds everything. The iPhone app, the Android app, the clinic link and every page of the website are written from the same JSON file. When I correct one word and upload the file, the website follows within minutes, with no rebuild.
  • Written by a clinician, for people. Every page carries my name, my qualifications and the date it was last reviewed.
  • The same privacy. No account, no login, no advertising, no tracking. Your check results stay in your own browser.
  • A clinic link opens everything. A patient whose dentist uses Six Figures pastes his personal link on airwayaware.app/member, and the whole programme opens in that browser.
  • Members on the web, powered by RevenueCat. With iPhone version 1.2, a subscriber opens premium in any browser with a short code from the app, at no extra cost. Next: subscribing directly on the web.

Judges, try this right now: our secret, revealed

You do not need to open the app for this. We are simply revealing our secret to you. Sit comfortably and follow these seven points for two minutes:

  1. Tongue up. Rest the whole tongue gently against the roof of your mouth.
  2. Teeth apart. Let the back teeth part slightly. Never clenched.
  3. Lips closed. Gently, without effort.
  4. Breathe through the nose, nostrils soft and gently wide.
  5. Stomach out as you breathe in. The belly moves, not the chest.
  6. Slow. Let the breath out be longer than the breath in.
  7. Light and silent. So soft that you can barely feel your breath.

Just keeping the teeth apart and breathing this way, you will feel yourself relax within a minute. That is the power of a correct tongue position, and that is what AirwayAware teaches.

Judges, try our night audio

Tonight, open the Night tab, put on your earphones, and play the bedtime audio as you go to sleep. It keeps playing after you lock the phone. It is not a cure for anything, but it helps most people, and we are confident you will wake up feeling refreshed the next morning.

How we built it

In less than 15 days, the content, the app and the App Store submission came together, alongside a full clinical practice. That was only possible because I used every tool for what it does best.

  • Claude is my engineer. I am not a coder. I decide, I explain the clinical logic, and Claude writes every line of code: the app in React Native and Expo, the scoring engine, the night engine, the Night Player, the oximeter decoding, the breathing calculations, the content system, the build scripts and the tests. Claude also helped me organise years of my clinical thinking into a structured knowledge bank.
  • ChatGPT made my PowerPoint presentations, drafted the article text from my knowledge, drew the article illustrations, and prepared the translation sheets.
  • NotebookLM turned my knowledge vault into lecture decks and educational video explainers.
  • ElevenLabs gave the app my voice. I cloned my own voice in ElevenLabs and we built a small pipeline: slide text in, my narration out, video assembled. That produced 24 narrated videos. If I had recorded them myself, between surgeries, with retakes, it would have taken weeks. Now, when I correct one line, a new video is ready in minutes. The same voice already speaks Spanish, and Marathi and Hindi are next. Every script was checked line by line by me before it was voiced, so every word is exactly what I teach my own patients.
  • RevenueCat runs the subscriptions: monthly and yearly, one "premium" entitlement, restore purchases, and the reporting. The paywall reads every price, currency and plan from the store for the buyer's own country; nothing is written into the app. I had opened my RevenueCat account long ago for my other projects, waiting for the right moment. Shipaton was that moment. RevenueCat lets us sell premium content without building a server or asking anyone for an account, and that is exactly what keeps our privacy promise real.
  • Content is driven by one JSON file on Cloudflare R2. Every question, weight, report, video, article and word on screen comes from that file. I change the content, raise the version number, and every phone updates itself, with no new app release.
  • Expo EAS builds the iPhone and Android versions.
  • My son Malhar handled the App Store side, the Firebase rules and the RevenueCat set-up, and shipped version 1.1 to Apple.

Challenges we ran into

  • Time. Surgeries by day, building by night, often at 2 am.
  • Apple. We submitted version 1.0 on Monday, 21 September. It went into review on the 23rd, and on the 27th it came back on guideline 2.5.4 (background audio). It was a misunderstanding: the bedtime track that plays in the background is a premium track, so the reviewer, without buying, heard nothing. We answered the same evening with a screen recording from a real iPhone, sent expedite requests and wrote to Apple. Version 1.0 was approved and went live on 30 September. We kept building through the wait, and version 1.1 went to Apple the next day.
  • A cheap oximeter with no manual. We decoded the raw Bluetooth signal of an everyday finger oximeter ourselves, frame by frame, with no SDK, including its pulse wave, which is where heart-rate variability and the stress index come from.
  • The phone's own clock. The audio clock drifted 3.4% slow against real time, which pushed sound and oxygen out of step. Now every second is mapped to real wall-clock time.
  • Averages hide danger. One real test night read "mostly healthy" on average, while it hid 12 oxygen dips in 25 minutes. So our engine now searches for the densest cluster, not the average.
  • Silent failures. A database rule was quietly refusing night reports. Now every refused write says so on screen.

Accomplishments we are proud of

  • A clinician with no coding background built a complete health app for iPhone and Android in less than 15 days.
  • Version 1.0 live on the App Store, and version 1.1 with the night recording already submitted, one day later.
  • 24 videos in my own voice, without sitting in front of a camera for weeks.
  • The same Night Player for the patient and the doctor, and a report any doctor can read in a minute.
  • A privacy design that is simple and honest: nothing about you leaves your phone unless you send it.

What we learned

Every AI has its own strength. Claude codes, ChatGPT designs and writes, NotebookLM teaches, ElevenLabs speaks. A doctor who knows exactly what he wants can now lead all of them, and turn 29 years of clinical knowledge into something the whole world can use.

What's next

  • My full lecture in a chaptered player: the opening chapters free, the rest for members. It arrives through the content file, with no new app release.
  • Google Play. The Android app is built and running. Google Play takes about 14 days to review and open a new app to the public, and we did not have those 14 days before this deadline. AirwayAware launches on Google Play very soon, with the RevenueCat SDK, exactly as on iPhone.
  • More languages: Marathi, Hindi and Spanish, as each translation is completed.
  • Members on the web: iPhone subscribers use their subscription on airwayaware.app at no extra cost, with a short code from the app (iPhone version 1.2).
  • For iPhone users, the clinic link (below), in version 1.2.

For doctors: the door is opening

AirwayAware also connects to Six Figures, the practice software I built for my own clinic, now at version 122.

  1. The doctor sends the patient one link on WhatsApp. No login, no app needed.
  2. The patient takes the screening on the phone, and the score appears on the doctor's card by itself.
  3. When treatment starts, the same link opens the full check, the exercises, breathing practice and night recording.
  4. The nights travel to the doctor's own private cloud and open in the same Night Player the patient has in the app: the clock, oxygen, pulse and sound second by second, plus buttons that jump straight to the moments that matter.

A full polysomnography report is difficult to read, even for many doctors. Our report is written so that a doctor understands the night at a glance, and can decide in a minute whether this patient needs a proper sleep study. The dentist becomes the front door of sleep medicine.

Other doctors can use the same system. Their patients' nights stay on their own cloud, never on ours.

Why AirwayAware deserves the Peace Prize

  • Nearly one billion adults worldwide are estimated to have obstructive sleep apnoea, and most of them do not know it.
  • Mouth breathing touches around 60% of people. It quietly shapes faces, teeth, sleep and energy.
  • Children labelled hyperactive or inattentive are often children who sleep badly because they cannot breathe well at night. Catch it early and a whole life changes direction.
  • Sleep touches everything: mood, weight, the heart, focus, relationships, work.

AirwayAware takes one dentist's 29 years and gives them away to anyone with a phone, in their own language, with their privacy fully protected. It creates awareness, it gives people safe things to do tonight, it lets them see their own night, and it sends them to the right specialist sooner.

Winning this prize would carry this message to the whole world. Millions of people would hear, for the first time, that their snoring, their tiredness and their child's restless nights may begin with something as simple as where the tongue rests. That awareness alone will improve their quality of life.

This is not the end of a hackathon. This is the beginning.

Thank you

  • RevenueCat, for Shipaton and for the tools that let a clinician sell honestly without building a server.
  • ElevenLabs, for giving my patients my voice, in their languages.
  • Anthropic's Claude, my engineer and research partner.
  • OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's NotebookLM, for the presentations, illustrations and teaching decks.
  • Malhar Bakshi, my son, for the App Store, Firebase and RevenueCat side.

Dr. Kedar Bakshi

B.D.S. (Mumbai) · Post Graduate Diploma in Orthodontics (USC, Spain) · Fellow and Diplomate in Implantology: F.I.S.O.I. (ISOI, India), F.I.C.O.I. and D.I.C.O.I. (ICOI, USA) · Curriculum Implantology for MSc in Implantology (DGI, Germany) · Diplomate in Orthodontics (DOWI, Spain)

India's first implant design patent · Inventor of OsseoSure · India's first oral appliance patent for sleep apnoea

29 years in clinical practice · Sai Smile Dental Care, Vasai East, India · https://airwayaware.app

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Updates

posted an update —

Shipathon Project Status & Launch Journey Update We want to provide a transparent update on our multi-platform execution and deployment journey. Our active, baseline entry for Version 1.0 is fully deployed, validated, and completely operational without Bluetooth. To showcase our rapid development cycles, we have also completed the advanced Version 1.1 architecture, which couples ambient snoring audio recording with raw SpO₂ data from a third-party Bluetooth oximeter on a single synchronized timeline. Because we want the panel to audit our advanced engineering right now, we have bypassed standard store bottlenecks by providing direct access via our functional Web App link alongside our standalone Android APK and Expo builds. Simultaneously, our public iOS 1.1 build is caught in an unprofessional bureaucratic loop with Apple App Review. Even after we proactively audited our setup, corrected a hidden Age Rating questionnaire mismatch to "NONE" for medical treatment, and cited official federal regulations, the reviewer lazily copy-pasted an identical boilerplate template rejection demanding medical clearance documents. Instead of backing down against this automated loop, we immediately stood our ground and formally escalated the entire case directly to the App Review Board Senior Management. Our active appeal utilizes a strict 5-point legal defense citing official U.S. FDA Guidance for Low-Risk General Wellness Software, which explicitly exempts passive consumer data-logging pipelines like ours. While we force a senior manager to override the lower-level queue and clear the public iOS App Store link, our systems are fully shipped, valid, and open for direct verification across Android and Web. Thank you for tracking our execution journey.

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