Sleep trackers in App Store

I searched “sleep tracker” in Apple App Store and downloaded all that looked relevant.

These 2 apps don’t work ( or I couldn’t figure out how they work…)

Sleep trackers with additional devices/accessories:
These apps require a particular product/device but and I don’t have one so I didn’t get to try any of them.

Sleep trackers with motion-tracking:
These 3 track my movement during my sleep, I tried all of them.

1) Luna Tracker:
I can set up an alarm to wake me up in the morning, I can choose to use the “smart alarm” which will go off when my movement indicates light sleep (between a half-hour range of the time I set). When I wake up, I can rate my feeling about the quality of the sleep, and I can see my movements during the sleep and how many “deep sleep” and “light sleep” I had. Also there’s an activity tracker, if I manually input my daily activities that relate to sleep quality, i.e. caffeine, workout, etc., I can observe if my sleep quality got affected by those activities. There’s also other choices to observe the sleep data, for example, I can choose to see a month chart, but it only shows the length of the sleep, not the quality. There’s also a feature called “share with doctor” which I think would be very helpful for doctors to help their patients.
* I have to keep my phone running and place it on the mattress with me during my sleep.
         

 

2) Sleep Tracker:
A very simple, focused sleep motion tracker. The result is also presented in a very simple way, no additional information or an overview.
   

The app crashed a couple times and I don’t know why it didn’t get the whole night’s data although I placed it on my mattress and left it on.
Not a very impressive experience.

3) SleepBot:
Very easy to use and very nice interface with calm, peaceful color. It also has the “smart alarm” like Luna Tracker has, and the motion tracker as well. In addition to these features, it can also record the sound during the sleep. I didn’t try to record the sound because I don’t want to hear something scary and I don’t think I would spend 7 hours listening to myself sleeping… But it is nice to have this feature if someone is really curious about what happens during his/her sleep, although I guess there would be only fricative noise…

I tried the motion tracker two nights and got 2 very different results…,but I don’t really feel there’s a big difference between the 2 nights of sleep, so I don’t actually know how to interpret the data I got.

SleepBot also provides an overview feature for me to see the trends, but it’s only length not quality.
It also provides some tips of falling asleep or staying awake, which I think is very helpful! For example I learned what I should eat to stay awake and what I should eat to fall asleep easier.

 

Questions on motion-tracking sleep trackers: 

1) I wonder how many of the “move” I had on the chart actually from my move and how many move I had were not recorded.  For example, I might kick my phone out of my bed and thus it records a big movement and then a long time of stillness; or my roommate/pets might accidentally touched my mattress…

2) I wonder if the action of putting my phone close to me during my sleep affects my sleep quality. I think that knowing my phone is there running something might cause some tension in mind; and the feeling of actually feeling my phone is close to me during my sleep is not a very comfortable experience to me.  (I have a full-size mattress so it’s hard not to feel my phone when it’s in my bed)

3) I usually sleep with my dog when I was home. In that case it might be difficult to know which movement is mine and which is my dog’s?

4) The “smart alarm” is not that useful as I expected. I usually wake up without the alarm. Actually, I wake up a couple times with an interesting alarm called “birds in a wood” that I found in another app called “Sleep Well,”  but I never wake up with the smart alarm. I do believe the theory that it would be easier for me to wake up during a light sleep which is exactly the goal of some of the apps, but why they are not working?

5) How to define ‘awake’, ‘light sleep’, ‘deep sleep’? Each app seems to have different metrics?

 

Other sleep trackers:

There are some other trackers record only the length of sleep, either rely on manually inputs from the user or use a time recorder. I am not sure if this makes sense to me, because as an bipolar, sometimes I need very little sleep and sometime I sleep through 24 hours. The sleep length doesn’t always connects to the quality of sleep nor the energy I have the following day.

It is interesting to see various interfaces on sleep data, and some of them did encourage me to think about the visualization of the data. I think it would be interesting to explore what kind of visualization make sense to those who need help revealing their sleep patterns.

 

Other sleep trackers I’ve tried

Last but least, I would like to share my experience with the Q sensor as a sleep tracker.
What is Q sensor: The Affectiva Q Sensor is a wearable, wireless biosensor that measures emotional arousal via skin conductance, a form of electrodermal activity that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation. The sensor also measures temperature and activity. (http://www.qsensortech.com/overview/)

Below is an example of my sleep data recorded by a Q sensor:

I can obviously see the storms and the movements during my sleep which make a lot of sense to me. The only problem I had with this sensor is I can’t connect it to my iPhone, I have to download the data and open them with the Q software, but it is a very powerful tool for me to learn about my sleep quality.