SHOULD YOU USE A SLEEP TRACKER?

THE desire to examine every aspect of our activity has grown — and there are ever more devices promising to turn your activity into easy-to-read data.

But is this good for you? When it comes to sleep tracking, I think not.

Even monitoring brainwaves in a lab may not give us a comprehensive representation of sleep. EEG (electroencephalography) — the gold standard for measuring sleep — tells us only what is happening on the surface of the brain. So what hope is there for a device on your wrist?

The greatest impact these trackers have had is on increasing rates of a condition known as orthosomnia — where people become obsessed by their sleep and diagnose themselves with sleep disorders based on their sleep tracker’s data.