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 :
- consumer level devices don’t do a good job of tracking sleep.
- 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.