Sleep Monitoring & AnalysisBelow are the leading dedicated sleep sensors and sleep systems, fitness trackers with sleep tracking features, and the top apps for tracking sleep with an iOS or Android phone.
Updated: November 10, 2015
Primary Sleep Tracking ProductsThese products are "Sleep Systems" developed with sleep tracking and analysis as the primary goal. However, these are not considered medical devices, and shouldn't be used to diagnose or treat medical conditions. The leading sleep monitors and sleep analysis products are as follows.
Beddit Smart 2.0 Sleep Monitor with Smart Alarm (iOS and Android) Beddit Smart 2.0 on Amazon > Beddit's latest generation sleep tracking system, the Beddit Smart 2.0, tracks time asleep, heart rate, breathing rate, snoring time, and how many times you get up during the night. A Smart Alarm tries to wake you during a light sleep cycle within your specified wake window. Automatically starts sleep tracking for those using iOS; Android users will need to indicate in the app that they are going to sleep. The sensor itself slips under your sheets. This updated version uses Bluetooth Smart as opposed to Bluetooth 2.0. Unfortunately, it does not have great reviews. Beddit Sleep Monitor with Smart Alarm (iOS and Android) Check out Beddit on Amazon > Check out Beddit Website > The original Beddit is a paper-thin strip that you place across your mattress underneath the sheets. There is nothing to wear on your body. The strip uses ballistocardiography to gathers data throughout the night including activity level, heart rate, and breathing rate. It uses both the ballistocardiographic strip and your smartphone's microphone to measure snoring. It syncs the data wirelessly to your nearby smartphone via Bluetooth and uses the data to draw conclusions about your quality of sleep during the night. The accompanying Beddit app provides you with the metrics each morning, reporting when you went to sleep and woke up, total sleep time, duration of deep sleep and light sleep, ambient sound and snoring, respiration rate, average heart beats per minute while asleep, and time to fall asleep. It also provides one high-level "Sleep Score" that rolls the metrics into a single number to give you a quick way to compare sleep quality across nights. The device's accompanying app also has a "smart alarm" that will wake you up during a period of light sleep up to 30 minutes before your target wake-up time. Waking up during light sleep is supposed to leave you feeling more refreshed and less groggy. The app also offer sleep tips based on your data, for example "Try a deep relaxation technique prior to bedtime to relieve stress." A fitness tracker company, Misfit Wearables, has recently partnered with Beddit. Though the Misfit Wearable's Shine fitness tracker already tracks basic sleep stats, the partnership with Beddit allows them to offer the advanced Beddit sleep sensor through the Misfit store and to integrate Beddit's sleep tracking data directly into the Misfit Shine app. This allows Misfit Shine users to log into one app and see everything from detailed activity data to detailed sleep data. Misfit Android app users will have to wait a little bit longer before Beddit data is integrated into their app. However, for those using the Beddit Sleep Monitor's proprietary app, both iOS and Android mobile phones are currently supported (see the supported models listed here). While it can also be used with tablets, it is not designed for tablet dimensions or resolutions. Unfortunately, the Beddit Classic does not have great reviews. Sleepace RestOn Bluetooth 4.0 Sleep Monitor (iOS, Android) Sleepace on Amazon > The Sleepace is, in form and features, quite similar to the Beddit system. Position a thin strap across your mattress and under your sheets. A 2 foot sensor embedded in the strap tracks sleep cycle, heart rate, respiratory rate, and your motion during sleep. In the app, see your daily data as well as weekly and monthly sleep reports. It does not track standard Light, Deep, and REM sleep stages, instead offering its own breakdown of Light, Moderate, and Deep sleep. You must tell it when you are going to sleep and when you wake up. SleepRate (iOS only) Check out SleepRate on Amazon > Check out SleepRate Website > The SleepRate kit includes a chest strap heart rate monitor that pairs with the SleepRate app via bluetooth. You wear the chest strap any night you'd like to collect sleep data. The heart rate monitor data is passed through an algorithm that can determine how long it took you to fall asleep, how many times you awoke, your sleep stages, and whether there were other disruptions during the night. The SleepRate app uses the microphone on your nearby smartphone to detect ambient noise and snoring to determine whether these might be disrupting your sleep. In the morning, you'll get a Sleep Report that summarizes the night. Sleep reports include sleep duration, sleep stages, how many times you woke up and for how long, graphs of snoring, and heart rate and stress level (as determined by Heart Rate Variability) during the night. You can also listen to environmental noises that woke you up. After five nights of collected sleep data, SleepRate prepares a Sleep Assessment that you can access via the app. The Assessment looks at sleep issues fall into any of three main categories (ongoing snoring, sleep environment, or psycho-physiological issues). You can see a sample Sleep Assessment here. Finally, SleepRate presents a Sleep Improvement Plan for you to follow. The plan integrates methods from the Stanford Sleep Clinic (for example, having a consistent bed time and wake-up time, and creating a buffer zone of relaxation time before you go to sleep). Sleep Rate has licensed specific Cognitive Behavioral Therapy solutions from the Stanford Sleep Clinic to help address insomnia, and claims to have an 85% success rate in studies. The full set of behavioral steps toward better sleep can take 4 to 8 weeks to implement. Here's an example Sleep Improvement Plan. S+ by ResMed Sleep Monitor (iOS, Android)S+ by ResMed Sleep Monitor on Amazon >
The S+ is a small, rectangular bedside monitor. It tracks your breathing and movement via radio frequency technology, and it tracks the room's environment including light, temperature, and ambient sounds. The accompanying app processes the nightly data to present your stats along with suggestions for addressing potential issues. Reports time awake, light sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, and an age- and gender-adjusted guideline for what typical sleep might look like for your demographic cohort. Features a smart alarm that attempts to wake you during light sleep cycle close to your ideal wakeup time. You must tell it when you go to sleep and when you wake up. SLEEPSense by SamsungSLEEPsense is a new Samsung technology that was announced in September of 2015, though is unlikely to be available for purchase before early 2016. This under-the-mattress device tracks sleep quality, quantity, and patterns. It streams the data to your smartphone, and crunches the numbers in order to provide you with personalized reports and recommendations for improved sleep that span nutrition, lifestyle, and exercise. The device tracks heart rate, respiratory rate, total sleep time, time to fall asleep, times awoken, times you got out of bed, percent time in REM sleep, percent time in deep sleep. It can be linked into the Samsung SmartThings app, and together with other smart home devices, you can automate your sleep climate for optimal sleep, automatically turn off the TV when you fall asleep, or control other smart home devices like lightbulbs, security cameras, and more.
The SLEEPsense has a smart alarm feature that will wake you during the least disruptive sleep cycle. According to Samsung, the SLEEPsense is 97% accurate at detecting sleep patterns. Lark Technologies: Silent Alarm Clock & Sleep Band + Pro Sleep CoachCheck out Lark & Lark Pro on Lark's website>
Check out Lark & Lark Pro on Amazon > The Lark Silent Alarm Clock & Sleep Band is a soft band you wear on your wrist. When it's time to wake up, it buzzes silently against your wrist to wake you up without disturbing your partner. It also tracks your sleep and comes with a sleep journal app that lets you compare sleep data across nights, tag issues that interfere with your sleep, and set sleep goals. It comes with a free one-week trial to Lark Pro Sleep Coach. Lark Pro Sleep Coach is a sleep coaching service offered on top of the Silent Alarm Clock & Sleep Band. You can buy the band first and upgrade later to Pro, or you can buy the band and service together as a bundle up front. To use Lark Pro, you first amass 7 days of sleep data via your band, called the "Sleep Assessment." Lark Pro experts then examine the data in order to provide useful information and coaching that is intended to help improve your sleep over time. According to Lark, more than 70% of Lark Pro users experience improved sleep within a month. Withings Aura Smart Sleep System (iOS)The Withings Aura, which debuted in 2014, utilizes a three-part system: a thin pad you place under your sheets, a bedside device, and your smartphone.
The thin mattress pad is a sleep sensor that measures your movements, heart rate, and breathing. The bedside device measures noise pollution, ambient temperature, and light pollution. It also emits red light when you're going to sleep (red wavelengths have been shown to not interfere with the body's production of melatonin, a sleepy-time hormone) and blue light when you're waking up (as blue light is strongest at dawn, and has been shown to send a signal to the brain to wake up). It also can emit soothing ambient sleep sounds. The accompanying Aura app lets you control the bedside device for customized sleep and wake preferences. It also lets you visualize your sleep quality from previous nights, including when you went to sleep and woke up, how long you slept, periods of REM, light, and deep sleep and wakefulness throughout the night, how long it took you to fall asleep and get out of bed, how many times you woke up and how many minutes you were awake. Additional metrics (heart rate, breathing) will likely be reported as well, but full details won't be released until the Aura become available later this summer. With this information in hand, you can better understand what might be waking you up at night or causing restless nights and frequent waking (temperature? noise?) so you can zero in on the ideal sleep environment for you. The Withings Aura is compatible with iOS phones. Sense by Hello Check out the Sense Kickstarter site > Check out the Sense Website > All the above three sleep monitors are all currently on the market (or just about to be); Sense is a sleep sensor still under development. It's in the midst of a Kickstarter fundraising campaign that has so far (August 10th, 2014) been very successful; They aimed to raise $100,000 by August 22, by have already raised $1.9M by August 10th. Like the other sleep trackers above, Sense provides a summary sleep score for your night and features a "smart alarm" that wakes you up during a light sleep cycle so you feel refreshed rather than groggy. It also tracks and reports on a variety of sleep-relevant metrics. The product is a three-part kit: a small pillow-clip called the "Sleep Pill", a desktop orb called the "Sense", and an accompanying app. The Sleep Pill tracks your motion as you sleep via a 6-axis accelerometer and a gyroscope in order to know when you fell asleep, when you woke up, and the quality of your sleep inbetween. The orb tracks ambient room temperature and humidity, noise pollution and snoring, and particulate matter in the air. The orb also contains speakers that can play relaxing sounds and that sound the smart alarm when it's time to wake up. A proximity sensor housed in the orb will sense when you wave your hand nearby and will turn off the alarm in response or will report the condition of the room. Red LED lights housed in the orb glow for a short time at bedtime. It comes in two color options: black and white. Both the Sense orb and the Sleep Pill sync wirelessly via Bluetooth Low Energy and ANT to your nearby smartphone. From there, you can control the device's wakeup or sleep program and check data. The company aims to ship initial units to Kickstarter backers in November 2014. Fitness Trackers with Sleep Tracking FeaturesThese are products developed to track not just daytime activity but also sleep metrics. Most fitness trackers on the market today offer some level of sleep tracking in addition to activity tracking.
Basis Peak Watch Sleep Tracking Among fitness trackers with sleep tracking features, the Basis Peak (review here) and Basis B1 (review here) do a very robust job. To begin with, the Basis Peak is one of the few fitness trackers that automatically tracks when you fell asleep and when you woke up (the Misfit Shine also does this, as do the new FitBit Charge, FitBit Charge HR, and FitBit Surge). What really sets he Basis Peak apart in the sleep arena, though, is that it's the only fitness tracker that charts your sleep cycles (deep sleep, light sleep and REM sleep). It's accurate, too: Preliminary research carried out in partnership between Basis and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center (SFVAMC), and the Northern California Institute of Research and Education (NCIRE) shows that the Basis' ability to estimate when you fell asleep and woke up, and how much time you spent in each sleep cycle, is quite accurate. A PDF of the preliminary report summary is here. In addition to charting your sleep cycles throughout the night, the Basis Peak also charts how many times you tossed and turned, how many times you woke up, total sleep duration, when you went to sleep, and when you awoke. A sleep report summary lands in your inbox once a week, with links to sleep tips. However, it does sometimes estimate sleep incorrectly. And when it does, there is so far no way to manually override the incorrect information. In my experience using the Basis B1, it sometimes categorizes non-sleep as sleep (like when watching a movie or reading in bed), or incorrectly estimates when I woke up (for example, if I get up for a glass of water an hour before my normal wake up time, and then I toss and turn as I sleep for another hour, it might not know that the last hour was truly sleep). Finally, while the Basis B1 was a bit bulky, the new Basis Peak is slimmer. I barely noticed the Basis B1 it about 95% of the time that I was falling asleep, so sleeping wearing the Basis Peak may not bother most people. But it could be uncomfortable for some, especially light sleepers. Other Fitness Trackers with Sleep Tracking Tons of other trackers track sleep to some degree (Fitbit, Jawbone, Misfit, Polar, Garmin, Moov, Withings to name a few), though most don't offer as much detail as Basis. At a bare minimum, they will record when you go to sleep and when you wake up along with the total hours you slept. As of 2015 many now automatically detect when you fell asleep and when you woke up, so you don't have to press any buttons. Some will also track how many times you were restless at night, how many times you got up, how long it took you to fall asleep, how many minutes or hours you were awake during the night, and estimated breakdowns of deep sleep, light sleep, and REM sleep. Rather than list all the fitness trackers here that track sleep in some minor capacity, I'll direct you to this site's comparison chart page. There, you can toggle columns on and off and sort by column to easily see which trackers offer sleep tracking. In the individual reviews of the devices, I've usually added info on each tracker's sleep features. |
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Sleep Apps
App reviews and information about apps are not a focus of this site. However, it seems prudent to at least list a few of the top apps that are relevant for sleep tracking:
These apps usually require that you place the phone somewhere on the bed with you. The accelerometer in the phone is able to measure motion as you toss and turn during the night. From that motion, the apps infer sleep quality metrics.
- Sleep Time (for iOS and Android)
- Sleep as Android (Android only)
- Sleep Bot (Android only)
- Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock (iOS only)
- MotionX-24/7 (for iOS only)
- Sleepmaster (Windows phones)
These apps usually require that you place the phone somewhere on the bed with you. The accelerometer in the phone is able to measure motion as you toss and turn during the night. From that motion, the apps infer sleep quality metrics.
