Sleep tracking has been a planned feature for Apple Watch for the past five years, Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology, revealed in an interview, and its inclusion in watchOS 7 and iOS 14 is a sign that Apple is eager to do more with your years. of research on the subject.
A long-rumored feature of the Apple Watch, the additional sleep-related functionality is intended to improve its users’ nighttime sleep, including encouraging users to establish a daily routine before bedtime. While it’s an expansion of Apple’s existing Bedtime feature on iOS, shifting from a simple sleep time metric to something more advanced has been in play for quite some time.
In an interview with CNETLynch confirmed that sleep tracking has been on the Apple Watch product roadmap since its original debut. Apple has been conducting sleep research for many years, including using EEG to measure sleep compared to an Apple Watch, but only now is it becoming something more important for Apple to present to users.
On the subject of the Wind Down feature, which helps establish a bedtime routine, Lynch explains that establishing a routine is important to sleep quality. “A lot of sleep apps show information about REM cycles and other data like that, and we’ve done a lot of research on that,” said the vice president.
While studies using EEG allowed monitoring of electrical activity in the brain during sleep, Lynch admits that “we have learned a lot about how the main thing here is really duration,” rather than actions. While limb movement can be treated as an input for monitoring via an Apple Watch, Lynch suggests that “it is not a complete picture of what is happening inside your brain.”
Apple’s decision to limit the data it provides to users is based on the results of those studies, and it did not provide apparently useful data to users. “It can be overwhelming and stressful looking at that data,” he says of tracking the results of sleep analysis applications. “You really can’t train yourself to have more or fewer REM stages.”
Sleep tracking settings on an iPhone
Believing it was not the best approach, Apple watched users prepare for sleep as a more actionable process. A routine “will result in people sleeping better at night, which has side effects that their REM stages may classify themselves.”
To further eliminate the stress of the need to improve sleep, monitoring in the Health app will avoid negatively pushing the user, opting for positive reinforcements whenever possible. Lynch suggests that the anxiety of going to sleep can “cause more problems,” and people “already know they haven’t had enough sleep.”
Like other health-related items on the Apple Watch and elsewhere, Apple does not intend to see any of the sleep data generated by its users. The internal studies, which were based on “thousands of people,” were instrumental in creating the machine learning models used for the analysis, which is done only on the user’s iPhone or Apple Watch.
“We treat the data that is collected on a user’s device with a high level of sensitivity to privacy,” says Lynch. Still, there is always a chance that Apple may open some kind of public sleep study similar to its existing heart and hearing projects, possibly to determine links in sleep-related conditions.
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