Sleep Apps in the Spotlight

Another sign that sleep health is going more mainstream every day is the proliferation of smart phone applications (apps) being designed for the consumer market. Hayley Tsukayama, consumer technology beat reporter for The Washington Post, writes that there are “dozens” of sleep apps in Apple and Google’s app stores.

Some offer meditation tips or even play soothing white noise. “Perhaps most intriguing of all, there’s also a whole class of apps devoted to sleep analysis,” she writes, “and apps that you leave up on your phone’s screen while you snooze that monitor your sleep based on your movements and the sounds from the room.”

Tsukayama tried four of these apps over a period of a few weeks: Sleep Cycle, SleepBot, Pillow andSleep Time. All are sleep-tracker and alarm apps, which are designed to help track sleep, as well as read sleep patterns, to wake up at the best possible time. To use them, “just call them up on your phone, keep the phone on and plugged in so the app can register your movement, and make your way to dreamland.”

Tsukayama concludes that “I did learn some things about my sleep patterns that were useful. For one, no matter how early I try to go to bed, I found it’s rare that I actually fall asleep before midnight…I found out that I tend to wake up every hour or so unless I’ve had a good workout that day, in which case I sleep a lot better.”

Source: Washington Post