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If you’re an executive seeking peak performance from the moment you wake up, or a parent hoping to create a better nighttime routine for your family, you’ve probably heard of sleep-tracking wearables, devices that promise to improve your health and productivity by monitoring your sleep. Sleep tracking is becoming increasingly ubiquitous: This month, Apple added the feature to tens of millions of Apple watches in a free watchOS 7 software update, and Fossil did it for select watches running Google Wear OS in August.
But despite years of work by wearable device researchers and developers, significantly useful sleep tracking remains closer to a dream than to reality. After testing the feature in previews of watchOS 7, I spent the last week testing Apple’s finished sleep tracker app, which meant changing my daily charging routine, putting my watch to bed every night, and checking my phone looking for information every day. Having been through that, I am convinced that I have experienced the kernel of a worthwhile solution, but like the first Apple Watch, it feels half-baked and not quite ready for prime time.
At the moment, I can’t in good faith recommend that busy professionals waste precious time on Apple’s current sleep tracker app, and I’m not very confident in rival solutions either. Even with the latest and greatest Apple Watch, users can expect little in the way of actionable information, along with the downside of recharging the smartwatch at noon every day, a step beyond the previous system of “put it down. at night “that people reluctantly began to accept years ago. My big takeaway is that most users will be better off waiting for more mature software and hardware before diving into sleep tracking, but if you want to experiment with the feature now, it’s here to try at no additional charge.
These are some of the things that I discovered during my testing regimen.
Laptop battery life is still the biggest issue
Since the first Apple Watch arrived in 2015, Apple has maintained the same battery life guarantee: 18 hours of run time between charges. The actual number can be much lower if you use the watch to make long phone calls, constantly download data, or track long runs or workouts, but on the other hand, the latest Apple Watches quietly beat the 18-hour promise if you disable or use only at the light its new functions. Regardless, Apple’s guide was simple: put the watch on your wrist every morning, don’t worry about battery life all day, then put it on a charger every night and repeat ad infinitum.
Given that it has had five years to prepare for the addition of sleep tracking, which obviously requires users to wear watches at night, Apple could have increased battery life any year with a larger case or more energy-efficient parts. power consumption to allow multi-day run times. . Some competitors have made those decisions, relying heavily on longer runtimes to differentiate their devices. Instead, Apple decided to market its way around its design commitments, and has recently floated the idea that users should recharge their watches during morning showers.
If you don’t, and the watch has less than 30% battery life when it hits bedtime, sleep tracking will be a problem. This is apparently not a basic background process, which means a lot of juice is being used for night tracking. I wonder how much of an impact it will have on the lifespan of Apple Watch batteries – sleep tracking alone could make rechargeable cells age faster than they did during the first five years of the wearable on the market, which which increases the need for previous repairs or replacements. .
Given that Apple successfully convinced tens of millions of people to take care of nightly charging of smart watches, especially from a time when watch use was on the decline, I’ll concede that it has a better chance of at least pushing some users transition to mid-day load, despite how crazy it sounds now. But from my perspective, the worst part of sleep tracking is that it interrupts my passive use and I enjoy the watch every day with the need to take the device off and put it on a charger for a while, just to get sleep data at night. . Between that daily hassle and the nature of the data, I don’t think sleep tracking is worth it.
Sleep data is modest and not particularly actionable
The interface of Apple’s sleep tracker app is simple. Tell him your preferred “bedtime” schedule – in my case, from 11 pm to just before 6 am – and she will be aware of sleeping during those times; noon naps will not be counted. It turns out that you have to set up tracking schedules to cover each individual day of the week, or use separate schedules for weekdays and weekends. I didn’t realize until too late that Watch hadn’t logged data for two full nights because it hadn’t set a separate weekend schedule to cover it.
Assuming the Watch collects your data correctly, you will see a very modest screen of data, including a bar representing your total “idle time”, timestamps representing the start and end points, and a bar graph covering the last 14 days. If you want a deeper dive than that, you can open the Health app on an iPhone to see the “average time in bed”, the “average sleep time” and, in some conditions, the correlation of your heart rate data night with your sleep schedule. One day when I checked the Health app, the heart rate data was there; another day, it disappeared from the app’s “Featured” list and I couldn’t find it.
I was somewhat amazed at how little information the Guard presented after a night’s sleep. The Health app displays an aquamarine bar representing “time asleep” superimposed on a darker blue bar representing “time in bed,” with gaps suggesting interruptions during sleep. That’s. There’s nothing about deep or REM sleep, and there’s no easy way to see if those interrupt bars coincided with an increase in your heart rate or some other event earlier in the week.
Apple has suggested that it is providing little data to prevent users from obsessing over their sleep schedules, as it could inadvertently generate even more anxiety or restlessness than before. I’m still not sure if that’s really an act of kindness or just a convenient excuse for disappointing functionality, but in any case, what was collected still doesn’t seem to warrant a downside.
Accuracy is positive
The most positive thing I noticed is a feeling, developed over time and in consultation with others who have also been testing the feature, that Apple’s sleep tracking data is mostly correct, even if there aren’t many. My watch seems to correctly extrapolate if I am “asleep” rather than just “in bed” based on sensor data, including some lack of movement, some wrist position information, heartbeat scans, and perhaps external factors . The water bars and gaps were temporarily aligned with my night dream memories, roughly up to the time I fell asleep. My two friends and my children have had the same experience.
As a parent, I already worry when I see multiple brief interruptions in my children’s sleeping bars when they have been sleeping elsewhere. If this is the future of health tracking, I can imagine a number of reasons why Apple, and doctors, including those concerned about privacy, might be concerned about presenting too much data, now and in the future. But in a healthcare setting, users should have the ability to choose how much data they are comfortable viewing, rather than being told that little or no data is being presented because of how they might react to it.
Apple’s Wind Down is better than your sleep tracking
While I’m not thrilled with the sleep tracking functionality, Apple did a good job with a related set of watchOS 7 and iOS 14 features called Wind Down. Rather than simply telling you how much you slept, Wind Down provides a holistic approach to unplugging you from your phone at night, gently encouraging you to calm down before a full Do Not Disturb regimen begins.
If you prefer to use apps to relax, you can create specific iOS shortcuts to get established, such as turning on a music playlist or podcast, opening an app for reading or journaling, or accessing apps for yoga and meditation. These shortcuts will appear on the iPhone lock screen to remind you to use them rather than digging deeper into your app collection. Alternatively, you can initiate a watchOS Wind Down sleep mode that begins whatever minutes you prefer before your scheduled bedtime and ends with Do Not Disturb.
These kinds of features may seem simple to implement, but they are actually well-thought-out OS-level integrations that show how sleep tracking functionality could become part of a broader sleep management experience for some users. You may want to keep using Wind Down even in the absence of sleep tracking.
Parting thoughts
Sleep tracking has been on the wish lists of smartwatch users for a long time, so I would love to be able to tell you that Apple made it through with the watchOS 7 feature, which is amazing and will improve your daily performance. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I’d be surprised if most people consider the information presented by Apple to be actionable, and ultimately found that there wasn’t enough value in the data to justify the hassle of loading at noon. After having tried sleep tracking for a week, I’m itching to turn it off and get back to my usual routine tonight.
That said, my intuition is that we are looking at what Apple considers version 1.0 of the feature, and that it has great potential for improvement in later software and hardware versions. Adding more actionable and cross-referenced data similar to heart rate “highlights” could help users diagnose what wakes them up at night. This could happen with more robust data collection overnight, such as ambient noise measurements the watch may already take, or potentially syncing data from bedmates, assuming Apple’s increasingly stringent privacy concerns they don’t stifle concepts. If the watch is going to use as much energy as it does at night, it should collect a lot of data and make the most of it.
There are alternatives, such as extending the battery life of the watch with a larger battery, so that the existing sleep tracking functionality does not require a recharge at noon. That would make the feature more palatable as is, with limitations and all.
If you already own an Apple Watch, or have considered buying one for sleep tracking, my advice would be to set low expectations for this new feature, and you probably won’t waste your time or energy on it. But you may find it useful in specific circumstances, so don’t be afraid to test its value for yourself, as you can get at least some of the limited information Apple is currently willing to offer.
