Do Sleep Trackers Improve Your Sleep?

by | May 8, 2019

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Sleep trackers are being talked about a lot currently. It’s a time when Apple fully invests in a product like the Apple Watch, “to help you stay even more active, healthy, and connected”[1]. Smartwatches not only count your activity in steps anymore, but also measure how inactive you are during one third of the day: while you’re sleeping.

How do sleep trackers work? And do they improve your sleep in any way? Read further to find out.

What Do Sleep Trackers Measure?

There are a lot of sleep trackers available on the market today. They range from non-wearable sleep trackers that sit next to your bed or even under your bed to wearable sleep trackers, that you’re attaching to your wrist. There are also sleep tracking apps available on iOS and Android, although these are not as advanced as the standalone sleep trackers that you can find on the market.

Every product has its own unique features, but most common qualities are:

– Sleep Quality. Sleep trackers can measure when your sleep is disrupted and thus showing you the time ranges when you’ve been awake subconsciously.

– Sleep Time. By measuring when you’re not moving in bed, the sleep trackers can reverse engineer when you were not asleep.

– Sleep Stages. There are several sleep trackers that measure the sleep cycles that you are finding yourself in. If the sleep tracker notices you are in your light sleep cycle, it knows it is a good time to let the alarm clock go off.

– Sleep Environment. Some trackers measure the environment that you’re sleeping in, like the warmth or lightness in your room.

– Sleep Coaching. A lot of sleep trackers have an integrated coaching feature, where they will ask you questions about your lifestyle choices through their accompanied applications on smartphones.

How Useful Are Sleep Trackers For Improving Your Sleep?

Sleep trackers can be very helpful for observing different patterns that are occurring in your night’s rest. You see a certain pattern that your night’s rest is worse when you work out after 9PM, or that you are able to feel more awake if you are waking up half an hour earlier, because you will be in another sleep cycle.

 

Personally, I don’t drink any coffee anymore after 11AM and find myself being able to go to bed at a much earlier state and wake up more energized the morning after.

The sleep tracking devices are very useful for looking back at your own sleep and analyze on which points you can test out different things and improve upon. In this way the sleep tracker can have an impact in how you will be looking to your bedtime.

However, sleep trackers do not actively improve your sleep. The thing is, by measuring how much time you’ve spent in bed, you’re in no way actively improving the rate in which you fall asleep or improving your sleep quality directly.

How Sleep Technology Can Actively Improve Your Sleep

With sleep technology such as the Somnox Sleep Robot, we have done everything to deliver a user experience that’s never been seen before. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to actively improve your sleep by using soft robotics.

By hugging the Sleep Robot at night, you will feel it breathe. By snuggling up to the robot, you will automatically adjust your own breathing rhythm accordingly. Apart from breathing with you, the Sleep Robot also uses smart audio to enhance your sleep. Listen to soothing sounds such as meditative music, ambient sounds and cognitive shuffling. They’ll turn off as soon as you fall asleep. By setting up your personal preferences during the day, ensures a tailored approach to improve the user’s sleep during the night. Users can also upload their own audio files to the app.

Being huggable and soft, the robot makes the user calmly doze off again. With the use of software updates, the robot continually improves, getting new benefits and thus becoming smarter over time.

References:

1: https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-series-4/

 

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