Sleep Watch

Smartly designed app for tracking sleep

$2.99 From Bodymatter, sleepwatchapp.com Made For iPhone, Watch Needs iOS 9.0 or later Apple clearly has sleep tracking on its radar after acquiring Beddit earlier this year, but if you want to monitor what’s going on while you slumber, there’s already an app for that. With one caveat: You’ll need to keep Apple Watch strapped to your wrist while you’re in bed.

Sleep Watch uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide insight into your nocturnal habits, including sleep rhythm tracking to help you get back to a regular schedule. Most of the heavy lifting takes place on iPhone, so Apple Watch becomes a passive participant used as a tool to collect data while you sleep.

The iPhone app looks great and provides a wealth of automatically recorded data – there’s no way to initiate tracking by hand – but you can manually confirm sleep times when you forget to wear your Watch. You can also enable a feature that inquires how rested you feel each morning, which will be included with other logged data.

The watchOS app isn’t exactly a slouch, and does a good job of displaying recorded information, including restful sleep, average heart rate, and, more importantly, how much your heart rate dipped while you were snoozing. Some of this data can even be displayed on your preferred Watch face, thanks to the app’s support for complications.

There’s just one big problem: Many Apple Watch owners have a hard time just getting through the day on a single charge. If you have to wear it all night to use Sleep Watch, when will you have time to recharge the battery? This isn’t really the developer’s fault, but it’s likely to be an issue for many users.

the bottom line. Monitor your sleep, with no hardware other than your Apple devices necessary. J. R. Bookwalter