Sleep plays a vital role in maintaining your overall well-being and daily functioning of the body, yet many people don't realize its significance.
According to research, approximately 50 million people in the United States struggle with sleeping disorders. 9% to 15 % of adults have insomnia. Since they don't get enough sleep, their daily productivity is reduced. Many adults are taking melatonin supplements to mitigate insomnia disorder.
A good night's sleep enables you to recover from a tiresome day and wake up refreshed, ready to start yet another day. Additionally, enough sleep is critical in improving your attitude, general health, and brain performance.
The brain stores information in long-term memory at the final stage of sleep when dreams occur. Many processes in the body take place when you are asleep. Therefore, failure to get enough quality sleep is likely to affect the body's normal functioning.
In the interconnected and fast-paced era, technological advancement has unveiled sleep tracker devices that monitor your sleeping pattern, sleep quality, and duration, among other activities. Today, it's easy to track and improve sleeping behaviors using wearable devices and smartphone apps while asleep.
This article aims to explore the power of harnessing sleeping trackers and give a comprehensive guide to using sleep trackers.
What is a Sleep Tracker?
Sleep trackers are wearable devices or applications that aim to monitor and analyze individuals' sleeping patterns.
They utilize sensor technology to gather real-time data on sleep duration, lifestyle factors, phases, duration, and movement during sleep. After collecting the data, they can analyze the sleep quality and make informed decisions regarding sleeping behavior.
Types of Sleep Trackers
Sleep has a great impact on your physical and mental health. It plays an integral role in achieving optimal levels of performance and alertness during the day. There are two types of sleep trackers used to measure the quality of sleep, namely;
• Consumer Wearable Sleep Trackers- Similar to smartwatches, wearable sleep trackers are devices worn on the wrist or finger to collect sleep-related data and heart rate variability constantly. The devices provide you with sleeping habits and patterns. With many devices offering sleep-tracking services to users, the wearable sleep trackers market is projected to grow increasingly in the coming years.
• Smartphone Applications- Today, nearly all smartphones have built-in sleep tracking software, utilizing the phone's accelerometer and microphone to detect movement and sound vibration when you are asleep. Again, other third-party apps offer more advanced and standalone tracking software, such as sleep score.
Benefits of Sleep Trackers
Understanding the role of sleep trackers in monitoring your sleep is crucial to maintaining your body's overall well-being. Sleep trackers gather essential information useful to doctors in diagnosing the probability and cause of certain sleeping disorders. Below are the benefits that come along with sleep trackers.
1. Promoting Awareness Of The Importance of Sleep
The availability of various apps and wearable tracker devices plays a critical role in creating awareness among users by continuously monitoring sleep. The data obtained enables you to understand unhygienic sleeping behaviors that need correction. Henceforth, you can adopt better sleeping habits to improve your sleep quality.
2. Providing Personalized Sleep Recommendations
Wearable trackers have extensive analyzing tools that give personalized sleep profiles from your unique sleep information. With these recommendations, you can adjust your lifestyle, sleeping environment, and routine to have improved sleep. For instance, you can change your bedtime to find a schedule that works best for your body. Therefore, by monitoring your sleep, you can assess the effectiveness of the implemented interventions over a certain duration and devise your routine until you get the desired kind of sleep.
3. Sleep Quality Assessment
The primary role of sleep trackers is to detect sleep interruption, informing you when you are turning or walking in the middle of the night. This data is necessary to assess sleep quality over time. An irregular sleep pattern indicates poor quality sleep, while a regular and uninterrupted sleep pattern shows quality sleep. Therefore, sleep trackers utilize sleeping behaviors to assess sleep quality, allowing you to make targeted interventions to enhance good sleeping habits.
4. Sleep Disorder Detection
Recently, some sleep trackers have proved to offer insightful information regarding detecting potential health issues in the body. By diligently monitoring your night sleep, you can spot irregularities such as sleep apnea and insomnia that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. This helps you seek medical attention from medical professionals and undergo extensive treatment for such issues at an early stage.
How Accurate Are Sleep Trackers?
Different sleep trackers vary in accuracy depending on the in-built technology and information collected. For instance, a smartwatch that monitors your sleeping pattern will not produce similar results to Eight Sleep Tracker. Similarly, standalone sleep tracking applications may have little hardware to provide detailed analysis of your sleeping habits and patterns, compromising their accuracy and reliability.
Additionally, analyzing and interpreting sleep data requires a contextual understanding of all factors affecting good sleep. Essential factors such as anxiety, stress, insomnia, and depression can affect sleep quality, yet sleep trackers do not capture them. Therefore, to get reliable recommendations, ensure you capture external factors such as environmental turbulences when analyzing information provided by sleep trackers.
Lastly, failure to wear sleep trackers consistently can interfere with the accuracy of the sleep quality. Sometimes you can forget or lose interest in tracking your sleep pattern. This can greatly affect the effectiveness of sleep trackers. However wearing sleep trackers consistently can provide more accurate sleep patterns and behavior data.
The Future of Sleep Trackers
As technology continues to evolve every passing day, many people anticipate sleep trackers to become a more accurate reliable, and cost-effective trend. The sleep trackers industry is likely to grow exponentially by integrating advanced sensors, machine learning algorithms, and various health monitoring systems.
Therefore, ensure you invest in one or more personal sleep trackers, whether wearable or non-wearable to effectively monitor and analyze your sleeping pattern.
In the coming years, sleep-tracking technology is likely have many consumer options, such as jewelry, radio, video, and routers, to help people suffering from sleep disorders or poor sleeping habits.
Conclusion
Due to the rapid growth in sleep-tracking technology many people have become increasingly interested in sleep-tracking compared to the last few decades. Technological advancements in tracking software and telecommunication have largely contributed to the growing market for sleep trackers. Like wearable sleep trackers, smartphones have applications that effectively track your sleeping patterns.
While it can be costly to acquire sleep trackers, some sleep-tracking devices cannot break your bank account. Since there are many options, get a device within your budget and begin monitoring your sleep routine and habits. Do not let this trend pass you.
However, ensure you access the limitation before getting a sleep tracker. Choose a device that resonates with your need and aligns with your budget.
