Can these GADGETS REALLY turn you into a sleeping beauty?
They claim to track how long you snooze — and how well. So why do so many of them alarm insomniac LIBBY GALVIN?
SLEEP FOR SALE! is the flashing image I see in my mind’s eye when I look at the growing range of sleep trackers on the market.
These devices, from wristbands to under-bed analysers and bedside monitors, promise to tell you what’s happening while you sleep, offering ‘insights’ that, if you believe the sales pitches, amount to setting up a sleep lab in your bedroom. The latest is Google’s Nest 2 Hub
(see box below), released last week, which ‘senses’ your sleep in addition to its primary function as a smart speaker and home assistant (similar to Amazon’s Alexa, controlling things such as your heating and lights).
Rather than just helping you drift off to sleep, these gadgets promise to provide information about how you sleep, prompting you to improve your sleep habits — a bit like a sleep diary. The data on your tracker may highlight if your bedtimes are all over the place, which can upset your body clock and disrupt sleep and its quality.
Having struggled with sleep since I was a child, I’m exactly the kind of consumer who might be tempted by devices like these.
Yet all of us are more concerned with sleep than we used to be, says Dr Maja Schaedel, a clinical psychologist at The Good Sleep Clinic and at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. ‘We need sleep to live longer. Without it, we will become fatter, develop cardiovascular disease and dementia, which leads to panic about ensuring we get enough sleep and attempts to control it.’
MOST of these trackers work by sensing motion and heart rate to tell us whether we are awake or asleep. Dr Schaedel suggests that many can be quite good at measuring time in bed but they struggle to determine total sleep time and night-time awakenings. ‘Looking at the entire industry of sleep trackers, they are about 70 per cent accurate in terms of the measurement of total sleep,’ she says.
A more contentious claim made by many gadgets is that they will provide accurate graphs of your sleep cycle, telling you how long you spent in each phase — light, deep and REM (rapid eye movement).
Sleep cycles matter because in deep sleep the brain ‘clears out waste products and trims what you have experienced in the day — it keeps some of it and dumps the rest, to refresh the brain’, says Dr John O’Reilly, a consultant sleep physician at The London Sleep Centre. ‘Then you go into REM sleep — often called the dreaming phase of sleep, where the body is entirely paralysed bar breathing and rapid eye movement — and your brain packages bits you want to keep into longterm memory.’
This is why light sleep then deep sleep is followed by REM in 90minute cycles. ‘After several cycles, you get less deep sleep because you have cleared all the rubbish, and you get more REM,’ he says.
But whether these gadgets can do this and a host of other claims they make is another matter. I put seven products to the test — and asked Dr Schaedel, Dr O’Reilly and Dr Nayantara Santhi, a senior research fellow at the Northumbria Centre for Sleep Research, for their thoughts on my findings.