It isn’t necessarily true that eight hours are enough to guarantee good quality sleep.
You may have had eight consecutive hours’ sleep last night but it doesn’t mean those eight hours were enough for you. You need much more than a watch to measure the quality of your sleep time.
We at Zigflex have brought you a selection proposed by sleep.org, a series of latest generation tools to help you interpret the quality of your sleep. We have grouped them together with some indications connected with the result so as to help you to understand better which functions they fulfil.*
Hours of sleep: These sleep trackers record and count the sleep cycle and can monitor how long you have slept for and transform it into a graph making it easier to interpret the sleep data.
UP24 by Jawbone is a bracelet to wear all day to keep track of all the activities you do during the day and night. As well as acting as a reminder to tell you when to go to bed, it can be used to work out how long you have slept for and the sleep phases you have gone through. Also, by keeping track of your daytime activities and the quality of your sleep at night, it can suggest whether or not you should have a coffee at 4 pm. The alarm clock can also be set for example for a timespan from 7 am to 8 am. The device will only wake you during the lightest sleep cycle so that you wake up feeling as rested as possible.
Interrupted sleep: Devices like FitBit tell you how long you have slept for and how many times you woke up. Its vibration wakes you up in the morning with a much softer call than a traditional alarm clock.
By wearing this bracelet and putting it in “sleep” mode, the sleep tracker records when you are completely asleep, if you move during the night, when and how much you moved. This could be a sign of more serious problems such as restless legs syndrome. It may also highlight cases of sleep apnoea, a serious breathing problem.
Sleep cycles: If you wake up exhausted every morning, even if you think you’ve slept enough, the problem might not be lack of sleep. When you feel drowsier it could be that you woke up during a deep sleep cycle.
Beddit could be the solution. It isn’t a wearable technology but an ultra thin sensor to be placed under the sheets. When you sleep on top of it and open the dedicated app on your smartphone you can see your heart rate, respiration, total time asleep, and sleep cycles. Based on your personal details, this system will tell you what to do to sleep better.
Basis uses a technology called “Advanced Sleep Analysis” to tell you exactly how much time you’re spending in REM, light, and deep sleep, as well as how much tossing and turning you’re doing. You’ll also see an analysis of that data over time, so you can tell if your sleep habits are improving or not.
Unlike other sleep trackers, Sleeprate monitors your heart beat and tells you how long it took you to get to sleep, how many times you woke up and which disturbances are in your bedroom, such as noise from the road or other people snoring. After five nights you’ll have a detailed report in your hands to tell you what causes your insomnia and how to solve this problem.
If you suspect you have a sleep disorder, you should contact a doctor and have detailed laboratory tests performed. These tools are not 100% precise and are not yet sensitive and sophisticated enough to be able to replace an advanced test by a specialist.
In a not too distant future more accurate and precise solutions will certainly be available. The National Sleep Foundation along with the Consumer Electronics Association has formed a group called “Wearable Sleep Monitoring Equipment Group” which helps to improve and help the world to sleep better through technology.
We at Zigflex will always keep you up to date as our strength is your #goodsleep.
* Classification based on “results” has an indicative purpose. For more precise explanations it is essential to obtain more details by clicking on the links to the individual devices.
