隨著醫療技術的發展，打鼾逐漸被人們重視。打鼾常常被人們誤認為是身體太疲累而造成的生理現象，但打鼾其實是睡眠呼吸中止症症狀之一。睡眠呼吸中止症對人們造成的影響有白天嗜睡、精神不集中、高血壓、心血管疾病甚至發生交通事故，這些看起來不是很明顯，但有時後卻是致命的。
睡眠呼吸中止症的治療方式有利用持續性正壓呼吸器、口腔裝置以及手術治療，而本論文著重在口腔裝置上。口腔裝置現在市面上的產品有超過20種，而大部分在設計上不符合人體工學，所以大部分產品使用起來常常使人們感到不適。
本論文為了改良市面上產品讓使用者感到更符合人體工學並改善呼吸中止症，進而設計一種高靈活度的口腔裝置，本論文設計的裝置主要是利用將下巴往前移動再藉著摩擦力的效果使下巴不會往回收，希望藉此來達到降低打鼾強度及呼吸暫停低通氣指數 (Apnea-hypopnea Index, AHI) 並利用有限元素軟體去分析設計的口腔治療裝置機構上的摩擦力作用是否足夠防止在睡覺時下巴往回收。
從結果可以確定摩擦力的作用是足夠阻止下巴往回收，但是不適用在有磨牙症症狀的病患。

With the development of medical technology, snoring gradually has been attended in recent years. Snoring is usually mistaken for the physiological phenomenon because the body is too tired. Actually, snoring is one of symptoms in obstructive sleep apnea. The obstructive sleep apnea will result in persisting sleepiness in daytime, a lack of concentration, hypertensive crisis, cardiovascular disease and even traffic accidents. These symptoms seem to be unimportant in daily time, but sometimes that are fatal in life.
Present treatments for obstructive sleep apnea include continuous positive air pressure, oral appliances and performing surgery. This thesis focuses on oral appliances. There are more than 20 kinds of oral appliances on the market, but most of them are often not flexible enough to be adjusted to fit these devices to all possible cases. These oral appliances are not ergonomically designed, so patients often feel uncomfortable in using existing produtions.
In order to make users feel more comfortable and improve obstructive sleep apnea effectively, a highly flexible oral appliance has been presented in the study. The oral device uses friction effect to maintain mandibular forward, and ensures that mandibular would not slide back during sleeping. As a result, the conceptual design is developed for reducing intensity of snoring and apnea-hypopnea index. For verifying the appliance is strong enough to prevent mandibular from sliding back, the study uses commonly commercial finite element software ANSYS for analysis.
The results show that friction effect could certainly prevent mandibular from sliding back, but that is not sustainable for those patients with bruxism symptoms. However, patients with bruxism symptoms is adapted for neither oral appliance proposed by this thesis nor others on the market.

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