Does Anyone have a sleep tracking app that they like

Software
1

I’m using SleepWatch and find that the information is not that accurate. Does anybody have a sleep application that they feel you don’t have to fuss with but just tracks your sleep based on the fact you’re not using your iPhone and your heart rate falls.

With my ADD the app that I previously had required that you said I’m going to bed now and also I’m waking up now and I found that I often forgot to trigger the app

I really want to work on improving the quality of my sleep and if there are other hardware that talks to your iPhone I’d be willing to make that investment

2

I’ve been using the Pillow app and have been happy with it. The app automatically starts tracking and gives you a report in the morning. I haven’t really compared it to others but I have no complaints with this one. Plus, the UI is nice.

3

Autosleep doesn’t really work all that well, lots of false data and sometimes doesn’t record data at all. Bought it with other apps in a bundle from the developer. I was then charged full price for each app seperately which didn’t help to sweeten the deal. I would stay clear of Autosleep and the others from this developer.

4

I’ve switched back and forth between looking at AutoSleep’s results and Pillow. They are both using the same data from the Watch via Health – but seem at times to come to completely opposite conclusions about such amorphous things as “sleep quality”. I favor AutoSleep for no scientific reason other than it seems to reflect my own perception of the night’s sleep and “quality” than Pillow does.

On the other hand, a lot of AutoSleep’s analysis (as well as all the other sleep apps I’ve tried) seems to be meaningless hoo-hah. In one recent week I went from having a 17% “sleep debt” one day to having a 2% “sleep debt” two days later, when all I did was go to bed 15 minutes earlier the day in between these. Goofy.

So, I’ve decided that what app I use doesn’t matter, what matters is using just about any app that seems to be accurately portraying the movement and heart rate data from the Watch, noticing the trends, comparing those trends to my own perceptions of “healthy sleep”. It would be just as easy to look at the raw data in Health, but at least the apps consolidate the data in a few charts.

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5

I’ve tried them all and have settled on SleepWatch. Autosleep always seemed to need constant adjusting and fiddling.

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6

I’ve used Sleep cycle for years and it works good enough for now

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7

I’ve recently been testing AutoSleep and Sleep++ and found them both to be inaccurate. Open to new app suggestions.

8

I use sleep ++
Love the app, simple, fire and forget.

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9

AutoSleep does the job for me.

10

Sleep Cycle is the app for me. Very accurate. I also track with my Fitbit and they match pretty closely… in fact I tend to use Sleep Cycle more often to check that my Fitbit has recorded my sleep correctly. Used the app for a full year now.

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11

For me, sleep tracking apps are a bad idea…

… If I know I’m going short on sleep I get anxious - and that prevents me sleeping. So I prefer to avoid looking at the question too much.

Talking to other people, some of them have the same problem as them. So I offer this perspective in case it helps anybody.

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12

I am using the smart wakeup feature with my Withings Steel HR watch. You can set an individual window before your wake-up time to have the watch vibrate during light sleep. Very handy, indeed. The sleep tracking itself is on par with Fitbit and the likes, while the display is in a continuous stream of entries.
The Sleep score is a very helpful metric consisting of several factors such as time slept, depth, regularity and interruptions. A score above 80 for me means restorative and healthy sleep, anything below 70 is not going well over extended periods of time.

13

I do research in sleep onset and insomnolence and have argued the same. That’s why mySleepButton doesn’t have much by way of statistics.

14

I do research on sleep onset and insomnolence from a cognitive science perspective. I attended the World Sleep Congress 2019 (in Vancouver, BC, September past).

Two of several take-aways from the conference :

  1. consumer level devices don’t do a good job of tracking sleep.
  2. the research linking even high quality EEG sleep tracking to quality of sleep shows remarkably little correlation.

So basically, the data from consumer sleep tracking devices are at best meaningless. And as I noted above, obsession of sleep tracking is very risky. Insomnia researchers are nearly unanimous that monitoring sleep is a precipitating and perpetuating factor for insomnia.

At the conference my academic colleagues and I presented several original research posters, including an update to our theory of sleep onset and insomnolence.

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15

Yup. I don‘t care that the graphs are not showing me real REM stats. The gyroscope and HR sensor do a good job of telling when I am moving more and have a higher heart rate, which equals in lighter sleep. Therefore, the watch wakes me by vibrating, should it recognize this inside my wakeup window. Really helpful for waking up less fatigued in my experience, Nothing more, nothing less.

16

Beddit is really good. It’s a strap that lies on the mattress plus an iOS app. You don’t feel the strap when you sleep. It detects breathing, temperature and movement. I find it the measurements to be quite accurate; i.e., they correspond with my experience. Have been using it for several months. I bought it at an Apple store. Apple bought the company a while back.

17

What about consumer devices with EEG sleep tracking, like these?

18

Commercially available sleep trackers like Fitbit are inaccurate. The algorithms are proprietary so we can; determine the validity of what they are measuring and their sampling rate is low in comparison with actigraphy (every 10 minutes vs every minute). Some even pretend to tell you what stage of sleep you’re in. Impossible.

19

I found Sleep Tracker (w/ iPhone on nightstand) was the best phone-only option. I used Pillow as well, in the bed, but the results seemed off in some way I don’t remember.

With the Apple Watch I went from AutoSleep to Sleep++ and now back to AutoSleep. Lots of insanely-detailed results, most of which I never look at.

With regards to tracking, I mainly want to be able to look at my watch and quickly determine how much sleep I have had so I can make a quick decision about whether to get up or try to sleep some more. When my mind is foggy and it is early I usually can’t remember when I went to bed (11pm? or 10:30pm? or was that the night before?) so having the watch automatically track that, without requiring my manual intervention, is key.

I’m retired, so my bedtime is quite variable. For a long time I was in a 11:30-5:30 pattern, averaging 6 hours of sleep. I recently dropped my caffeine levels way back, probably a 90% reduction (I was drinking 1-1.5 pots/day) and, not surprisingly, I am now averaging an extra hour of sleep per night. But without tracking I wouldn’t know those results as well, or as clearly.

20

Excellent question.

My reply re “consumer” was only meant to be in relation to the OP,

I’m using SleepWatch and find that the information is not that accurate. Does anybody have a sleep application that they feel you don’t have to fuss with but just tracks your sleep based on the fact you’re not using your iPhone and your heart rate falls.

rather than EEG, I was responding re actigraphy and ECG (e.g., with Apple Watch or its competitors), i.e., that they cannot validly reflect sleep with anywhere nearly as well as EEG (and other tech like fMRI) (and as I will note below: as humans).

At the conference, I met some great folks connected to Dreem. Without being specific (as noted below) I would say generally that EEG tech like Dreem’s with automatic scoring of EEG is quite promising for certain purposes, though it is still early days for other purposes.

EEG, although widely used and super important scientifically, does have limitations. As I mentioned, researchers working on this have strongly argued that none of the technical psychobiometrics predict sleep quality well. cf. Jamie Zeitzer’s “When a gold standard isn’t so golden:Predicting subjective sleep quality from sleep polysomnography” in https://worldsleepcongress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/WSS-2019-PRELIMINARY-PROGRAM-low-res-6-10-19.pdf .

There is also a huge issue around sleep state “misperception”. Sleep researchers , based on PSG, used to claim (and some still do) that insomnia typically involves misperception of one’s sleep. Counter evidence arose from fMRI, and more importantly an analytical (a priori) argument, from Daniel Kay (a colleague) and Daniel Buysse. Technical EEG data, even if processed through machine learning and an app, may be biased by the “old school” view of sleep state misperception. And manufacturers of this device (whether they succumb to them or not, and I have not a clue whether they do) have market pressures to convince consumers or imply that their device speaks the truth, and a complete one, about sleep. There’s a valiant attempt to provide the consumer with meaningful information. But involving a sleep expert to interpret the data may be quite helpful for some consumers (though admittedly that is not practical or affordable for many, hence sleep tech). These claims of mine are just generalities.

I wouldn’t want to express a particular opinion about any particular hardware here. I will likely take up related themes on the mySleepButton Blog – mySleepButton, which deals specifically with sleep issues.

(The above is not any form of advice, medical or other).
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