9/20/2023 0 Comments Fitness watch with sleep monitor![]() ![]() The primary element of sleep that trackers monitor is duration. Photo from Unsplash What do Sleep Trackers Track? In any case, the technology in sleep tracking watches provides impressively accurate information that people may use to improve their sleep hygiene. When it comes to measuring the stages of sleep - in generic terms, light, deep, and REM - the device will most likely make educated guesses based on the data it’s collected from a person’s heart and respiration rates. It’s safe to say that quality consumer devices are able to accurately track sleep duration. Data from both heart rate and respiration is used to determine the different stages of sleep and present the results to the wearer for a more complete assessment. ![]() This is pivotal to accurate sleep tracking. These days, most smartwatches are equipped with advanced sensors to monitor various aspects of a person’s health and fitness, which includes their heart rate and respiration. Sleep trackers with only motion detectors are considered somewhat less accurate than those that take into account heart and breathing rates. The algorithm then makes an estimate about the sleep duration and, in many cases, the overall quality of a person’s sleep. Motion sensors keep track of how much someone moves in their sleep and runs those measurements through an algorithm. ![]() Wearable sleep trackers - like smartwatches - use integrated sensors to monitor movement, heart rate, and breathing rate in order to draw conclusions about sleep quality and length. With this information, we can develop better sleeping patterns for more of those refreshed mornings and fewer sluggish ones. Sleep tracker watches collect valuable data about our physiological state to help us understand how long we’ve slept, how many times we woke up in the middle of the night, and even which phases of sleep we were in. While there are a number of reasons why you might wrestle with inconsistent sleep, the best sleep tracker watches offer a closer look at what’s really going on each night. On others, you wonder if you even slept the night before. Some mornings, it’s easy to hop out of bed feeling refreshed and ready to take on the day. "Do you feel well rested? Do you feel sleepy during the day? If you were to have a nap, how long do you think it would take you to fall asleep?" he asks.Many people struggle with the quality of their sleep. You may be the best judge of your sleepĪs a rule, Dr Reid advises against looking at your daily numbers, and to listen to how you subjectively feel. Over the course of the night, and with each subsequent cycle, you should also expect your deep sleep to decrease, while REM sleep increases. "Within each cycle, you should be getting some light sleep, deep sleep, light sleep and then REM sleep, in that sequence," he explains. Sleep occurs in "cycles" that last somewhere between 60 and 120 minutes. This means it's not really possible to say whether a particular amount of REM or non-REM sleep is "optimal".Ī more important measure, Dr Cunnington says, is how someone "sequences" through different sleep stages throughout the night. ( Getty Images)Īs Dr Reid explains it, the amount of sleep we get on a day-to-day basis changes in response to what's going on in our bodies. "But this has a drawback for shift-workers, or anyone outside of a nine-to-five schedule, who will be sleeping or napping during the day and need credit for that.įemales tend to report poorer quality and more disrupted sleep than males. "If you're only looking for sleep at night, you're less likely to have an embarrassing error where you say somebody was asleep in the afternoon when they were just kind of sitting around," she says. Some, for example, will focus almost exclusively on picking up overnight periods of sleep. So they went a little heavy on the 'sleep pedal'."ĭr Walch adds that devices will also differ in terms of how much they are programmed to pick up on sleep or naps that happen outside of "standard" bedtime hours. "To be clear, Garmin nailed every sleep in that paper," she says. In fact, standard actigraphy outperformed Garmin devices at accurately identifying periods of wake in a 2021 paper. However, she says, that has not automatically translated into a big leap in accuracy. Dr Walch says we should be asking how accurately devices predict when we are awake, versus asleep. ![]()
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