Technology often distracts us from sleep with the millions of content waiting right under our fingertips. However, technology could also give us the solutions to help us get that perfect night’s sleep. What better way to start 2019 than by sleeping, right?
Sleeping has transcended beyondinvesting in the perfect mattress or sleeping at the right room temperature. Formulating good sleep habits have increased in importance, and sleep trackers can help with just that.
Now, there’s no need to fret. With the overwhelming amount of sleep applications in the market, we’ve searched high and low to compile the best sleep trackers applications for you so you can match them accordingly to your needs.
For the Feature-Savvy: Pillow
Pillow is a freemium iOS-exclusive sleep tracking app that looks into your sleep patterns using your phone’s built-in hardware, such as your microphone and accelerator. It takes note of light sleep and deep sleep and an important phase in your resting time, the rapid eye movement (REM) stage.
Sometimes overlooked, tracking how much REM sleep you’re getting is crucial because it is the most restorative out of all the phases and a lack of which will leave you feeling groggy the following day.
A metric that Pillow tracks that pique the interest of most are the time in bed vs time asleep. Most think the two are almost equal, but if we don’t have a developed sleep pattern, it takes a while before we get to sleep.
It even has a Sleep Notes feature that helps you account for which food, drink, or activity could have delayed your slumber.
Additionally, this application has an intelligent alarm clock that wakes you up during your lightest sleep phase within a 30-minute window that you set. By doing this, it will feel less disruptive – just like waking up naturally! And while you’re setting up the alarm, a counter tells you how many hours of sleep you’ll get.
Those seem plenty, but this is just the beginning. Once a one-time premium fee of $7.99 is availed, this app reads your data and formulates personalised and curated insights regarding your sleep cycle. It can track your heart rate while you sleep and wake up. It also has a feature for napping, which can give important data about your energy levels.
For the Goal-Oriented: Sleep Score
If you love goals and reaching them through data, thenSleep Score is your app. It recognises how sleep is not a one-size-fits-all process, so it takes time to get to know you and your personal goals like feeling more energised, falling asleep quickly, or just improving sleep quality in general.
In preparation for falling asleep, Sleep Score provides a collection of white noise and ambient sleep sounds of nature that can ease you on your way to dreamland.
Unlike most apps where you set the wake-up time every night, Sleep Score is geared toward building a consistent sleep pattern. At night, it reminds you when it is time for bed. It also allows you to schedule your alarms so, in the morning, you can wake up at the same time regularly.
Similar to Pillow, Sleep Score also features a smart alarm, waking you up in a light phase of your sleep during a time frame that you set. While most apps have a default 30-minute window, this app lets you play with this time frame.
Apart from helping you set goals, the free version of the app also enables you to achieve them not only with data analysis but also with recommendations and resources.
To get the most out of the app, premium features must be unlocked for a fee of $8.49 monthly or $72.99 yearly.
For the Mystical: Sleep Better
With its simple, clean, and modern interface,Sleep Better lets you track your sleep duration and cycles. It also asks for the activities you did within the day that could affect your sleep, such as working out, drinking caffeine, or just feeling stressed in general.
Like the abovementioned, this app also has a smart alarm capability that gently wakes you up every morning.
You can get scientific with all these sleep analyses, but that’s just the basics of it! There are additional features that might interest the pop astrologist in you.
We know that dreams are intriguing and all, but they quickly slip away from our memory. Once its full version is unlocked for a one-time payment of $3.99, you can easily journal what you can remember from your dreams inside the app.
Additionally, since moon phases are believed to affect your sleep, Sleep Better tracks how you sleep relative to this astronomical body.
For the Android User: Sleep as Android
Wearables like the Apple Watch and Fitbit are seeing a steady rise in their number of users, so much so that experts predict that 2.1 million Australians will be sporting wearables in 2024. Those numbers are admirable and get us excited for the future of how sleep data and algorithms can be used but today’s tech is not bad either!
There’s a more than 50/50 chance that you’re reading this on an android phone. Chock-full of features that can make an iPhone blush, these phones also offer a lot of options to help you meet your sleep goals!
One snooze-related offering from the Google Play store is the Sleep as Android app! It’s a smart alarm clock and health app rolled into one. Aside from waking you up, this app helps track sleep stages you’ve achieved throughout the night which makes monitoring your bedtimes easier.
While it offers app purchases, this freemium app is still a must-have sleep aid for android users!
For the Apple User: SleepWatch
In the earlier entry, we talked about how recent sleep trends see the incorporation of wearable tech in helping people get enough sleep through graphs and streams of data. And no, it’s not because they’re too bored to go to bed!
One product that Apple users who collate sleep statistics should check out in the App Store is SleepWatch. Aside from being an excellent companion to your Apple Watch, this app can track activity and present data in easy-to-understand images.
If you feel Apple Health ain’t cutting it for your sleep medicine needs, the SleepWatch is your best bet.
For the Budget Conscious: Sleep Calculators
If you don’t want to burden your wallet with subscription fees and app payments of sleep tracker apps, using theEcosa sleep calculator paired with your phone’s built-in alarm clock app is the perfect solution.
Inputting your supposed wake time or sleep time, the sleep calculator will conveniently tell you the optimal time and schedule for a good night’s sleep.
By religiously following routine sleep and wake times, you wouldn’t need to worry about whether or not you’re getting enough deep sleep because your body will naturally sync with its circadian rhythm, our body clock of sorts. This allows you to sleep better and wake up with a good morning.