Sleep Trackers: Waking You Up Gently For A Better Day

Sleep trackers are devices that monitor your sleep patterns and habits to help you understand your sleep quality and make improvements. They can be in the form of rings, smartwatches, or even apps that use your phone's microphone or motion sensors to track your sleep. Some popular sleep trackers include the Oura Ring, Whoop 4.0 Band, Google Pixel Watch 2, and various apps like Sleep Cycle and Sleepwave. These trackers often provide insights into sleep stages, sleep duration, interruptions, and optimal wake-up times, helping users establish better sleep habits and improve their overall health and daily life.

Sleep tracking apps

One of the most popular sleep tracking apps is Sleep Cycle, which has over a million users. The app uses sound analysis to track your sleep without requiring any additional wearables or gadgets - you simply place your phone on your nightstand. Sleep Cycle provides a sleep score based on your sleep quality and offers insights to help you achieve your sleep goals, whether it's getting more deep sleep, improving your wake-up mood, or achieving consistent sleep patterns. It also includes a variety of relaxing music, sleep stories, and meditations, as well as gentle wake-up tones. The app also allows you to record and monitor snoring, coughing, breathing, sleep talking, and ambient noise, and provides daily, weekly, and monthly reviews, as well as suggestions and sleep-related topics to read.

Another option is the Sleepwave app, which transforms your phone into a contactless motion sensor, enabling accurate sleep tracking. It senses your movements and wakes you up during a lighter sleep phase, setting a 15-minute window for the alarm to go off. It also tracks your breathing rate, onset time, sleep depth, and wakefulness.

For Android users, the Google Pixel Watch 2 is a great option as it integrates with Fitbit to provide improved stress tracking, a daily readiness score, ECG, sleep scores, and silent alarms that vibrate to wake you during your optimal sleep stage.

If you're looking for a ring-style sleep tracker, the Oura Ring is a popular choice that provides convenient health and sleep monitoring in a lightweight, comfortable design. It offers insights into sleep as well as other aspects of health, such as stress, menstrual cycles, and illness monitoring. The Samsung Ring is another option, which includes features like snore detection and gesture compatibility, and the Fitbit Inspire 3, which has a sleek design and impressive battery life.

For those who are more fitness-oriented, the Ultrahuman app offers insights into maximizing energy throughout the day, including reminders on caffeine consumption, sunlight exposure, and wind-down routines.

Sleep tracking rings

Oura Ring

The Oura Ring is a well-known and highly-regarded smart ring for sleep tracking. It offers round-the-clock insights into sleep, fitness, and stress. The Oura Ring provides comprehensive coverage of sleep, including restfulness, deep sleep, and bedtime. It also has automatic workout tracking and improved heart rate sensors. The ring has a battery life of up to 8 days, and it is water-resistant. However, it is quite expensive, costing around $350, and there is an additional $72 annual subscription fee.

Samsung Galaxy Ring

Samsung's Galaxy Ring is a new entry into the smart ring market, and it has been well-received for its sleep tracking capabilities. It is comfortable to wear and has excellent battery life, lasting around a week before needing a charge. The ring provides in-depth sleep stats and is a good alternative to the Oura Ring, without requiring a subscription. However, it does come with a high price tag.

RingConn Gen 2 Air

The RingConn Gen 2 Air is a budget-friendly option for sleep tracking. It offers a range of sizes and colours, water-proofing, and a 10-day battery life. The ring provides simple scores for metrics such as sleep, stress, and vital signs, along with recommendations based on these metrics. While it is more costly than some other budget options, it does not require an additional subscription fee.

Ultrahuman

Ultrahuman is a smart ring designed for fitness enthusiasts, offering insights and reminders throughout the day, including when to wind down for sleep. It presents health data in a digestible manner, providing at-a-glance information on its homepage, such as body temperature, heart rate, and menstrual cycle phase.

Smartwatches with sleep tracking

Google Pixel Watch 2

The Google Pixel Watch 2 is an excellent choice for Android users seeking a comprehensive sleep tracking solution. It features improved heart rate sensors and integrates Fitbit's advanced sleep tracking capabilities. Fitbit's sleep tracking includes nightly trends, a silent alarm that wakes you during your optimal sleep stage, bedtime reminders, and sleep goals. The watch also offers improved stress tracking, a daily readiness score, ECG, and six months of free Fitbit Premium.

Fitbit Inspire 3

The Fitbit Inspire 3 is a slim and comfortable smartwatch that packs accurate sensors for sleep tracking. It boasts a nearly ten-day battery life, allowing you to monitor your sleep without worrying about daily charging. It comes with six free months of Fitbit Premium access, providing additional insights and features.

Withings ScanWatch 2

The Withings ScanWatch 2 is a hybrid smartwatch with a sleek analog aesthetic and powerful tracking features. It records sleep duration, depth, regularity, and interruptions. Additionally, it uses a medical-grade SpO2 monitor to detect breathing disturbances and performs a Respiratory Scan to measure heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation levels. The ScanWatch 2 also offers temperature sensing for deeper insights into sleep and women's health.

Apple Watch Series 10

For iOS users, the Apple Watch Series 10 offers a great sleep tracking and daily wellness monitoring experience. It seamlessly integrates with your iPhone, providing insights and notifications directly on your wrist.

Oura Ring 4

The Oura Ring 4 is a discreet and unique way to track your sleep and overall health and wellness. Worn on your finger, it provides detailed sleep tracking and insights in a compact form factor. However, it comes with a significant price tag and an additional yearly subscription fee.

These smartwatches with sleep tracking capabilities offer a range of features to help you understand your sleep patterns and improve your sleep quality. Remember that sleep tracking data should be considered as suggestions, and it's important to listen to your body and consult with a health practitioner if you have concerns about your sleep.

Mattress sensors

Sleep trackers are devices that collect information about your sleep. They can be wearable devices like a bracelet or ring, or non-wearable sensors that sit on your bedside table or under your mattress.

There are a few options available for mattress sensors. The Withings Sleep Tracking Mat is a thin mat that goes underneath your mattress and uses pneumatic and sound sensors to measure your heart rate, respiratory rate, movements, snoring, and sleep cycles. The mat is powered through a USB cable and must be plugged in. The accompanying app allows you to easily view your sleep data and automatically generates a sleep diary with a nightly sleep score. However, it's important to note that the mat may pick up the movements of a partner or pet sleeping in the same bed.

Another option is the Eight Sleep Pod 4 Cover and Hub, which is a mattress cover with sensors that track temperature (ambient and body), heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, movement, and sleep stages. Each morning, it provides you with a sleep score out of 100 and offers charts showing your sleep stages, health metrics, sleep latency, and consistency. The Pod 4 also has manual controls and provides temperature regulation, although it requires a subscription to access sleep tracking features.

Overall, mattress sensors offer a convenient and unobtrusive way to track your sleep without having to wear a device to bed. They can provide valuable insights into your sleep patterns and help you make informed decisions to improve your sleep quality.

Sleep tracking accuracy

Sleep trackers have become increasingly popular, with one in three Americans having used a sleep-tracking device. These devices are convenient, cost-effective, and easily accessible, providing users with a plethora of sleep data. However, it is important to evaluate the accuracy of these sleep trackers to ensure the reliability of the insights they provide.

The accuracy of sleep trackers has been the subject of multiple studies, with researchers comparing consumer wearables to lab-based studies and polysomnography. One such study analysed 11 commercially available consumer sleep trackers (CSTs), including wearables, nearables, and airables. The results showed that while specific CSTs exhibited substantial agreement with polysomnography, indicating their potential for sleep monitoring, there was also performance variation across different sleep stages and types of devices. For example, SleepRoutine excelled in the wake and rapid eye movement (REM) stages, while the Google Pixel Watch and Fitbit Sense 2 performed better in the deep sleep stage.

Another study compared consumer sleep-tracking devices to actigraphy, a sleep test based on data collected from a wrist-worn device used by medical professionals for diagnosing sleep disorders. The study suggested that consumer sleep trackers performed as well as, or even better than, actigraphy. This is due to their ability to collect accurate data over long periods without requiring much effort or notice from the wearer. As a result, consumer sleep trackers show promise in becoming the primary tools for sleep research in the future.

Despite the promising results, it is important to acknowledge that sleep trackers have limitations. They do not directly measure sleep but instead estimate it through inactivity and other surrogate measures. Therefore, it is recommended to take the data provided by these trackers with a grain of salt and consult a health practitioner if you have concerns about your sleep quality. Additionally, more research is needed to verify the reliability of these devices, especially as the technology continues to evolve.

In summary, while sleep trackers provide a wealth of sleep data and have shown promising accuracy in several studies, their limitations should be considered. They can be a useful tool for monitoring individual sleep habits and gaining insights into your sleep routine, but for exact data and diagnosing sleep disorders, medical sleep studies conducted by professionals are still necessary.

Frequently asked questions