New versions also analyze the heart rate and, most importantly, the Heart rate variability. Older versions of sleep trackers focused only on accelerometers and on the wrist movement analysis to monitor sleep. Sleep trackers have more sophisticated and advanced technology, which makes them more accurate. It’s good to know what you expect from a sleep tracker before you start using one. All of the devices work differently, and they each have personalized tips to help you sleep better. Technology has made it a bit easier to get enough rest through different gadgets such as a sleep tracker ring. Therefore, having a sleep tracker becomes quite essential regarding monitoring your sleep. Sleeping disorders are a significant problem for most citizens and can lead to economic consequences. The productivity of citizens, the economy’s primary driver. This leads to the economy being affected across the United States and the world at large. You might feel completely worn out and fall asleep during the day when you should be working. The brain fogs, and focusing on work and making decisions on different matters becomes quite challenging. When lack of sleep becomes a regular pattern, it starts affecting your mental health. Not getting enough sleep regularly can lead to severe medical conditions, including cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and diabetes. Sleeping disorders are also linked to significant consequences on our physical health. It's just not subjectively noticeable right at that moment."Īt the end of the day, however, it's up to the user's needs as to which product may be most suited for that person, Hagen added.Sleep deprivation has many adverse effects on the body, such as being moody and not fully productive. If your alarm goes off and you happen to be in a deep sleep stage, you will wake up very groggy, and could feel as though that sleep was not restorative, when in fact it could have been. Without that objective sleep data, you can only rely on how you feel when you wake up - and while that is important, that doesn't tell the whole story. "I need to understand what the consumer sees in the smartphone apps, what the usability of the devices is, etc. "I'm a big believer in living the research," he said.
Research in this area will evolve with the technology, added Hagen, who himself utilizes four to five sleep devices to keep monitoring his ZZZs.
"Updates to hardware, firmware and algorithms happen continuously, and we must understand how this affects accuracy." "While technology, both hardware and software, continually advances, it is critical to evaluate the accuracy of these devices in an ongoing fashion," Hagen said. Still, these findings revealed that there is a remarkably high degree of variability in the accuracy of commercial sleep technologies, the researchers stated. The commercial sleep technologies displayed lower error and bias values when quantifying sleep/wake states as compared to sleep staging durations. Researchers observed five healthy adults - two males, ages 26 and 41, and three females, ages 22, 23 and 27 - who participated by wearing the sleep trackers for a combined total of 98 nights. However, when thinking about what you generally have control over with your sleep - time to bed, time in bed, choices before bed that impact sleep efficiency - these can be accurately measured in some devices." This is not surprising, since typically brain waves are needed to properly measure this. "Some devices are currently performing well for total sleep time and sleep efficiency, but the community at large seems to still struggle with sleep staging (deep, REM, light). "The biggest takeaway is that not all consumer devices are created equal, and for the end user to take care in selecting the technology to suit their application based on the data," Hagen said.
The study is published in the Nature and Science of Sleep. All other devices, however, either overestimated or underestimated at least one of those sleep metrics, and none of the eight could quantify sleep stages (REM, non-REM) with effective accuracy to be useful when compared to an electroencephalogram, or EEG, which records electrical activity in the brain. Prompted by a lack of independent, third-party evaluations of these devices, a research team led by Joshua Hagen, director of the Human Performance Innovation Center at the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, tested the efficacy of eight commercial sleep trackers.įitbit and Oura came out on top in measuring total sleep time, total wake time and sleep efficiency, the results indicate. And like any consumer products, not all sleep trackers are created equal, according to West Virginia University neuroscientists.