WEARABLE health trackers such as Fitbit, Apple Watches, and Whoop have exploded in popularity, with sleep scores becoming a common topic of conversation.<\/p>\n
These devices have given people unprecedented access to detailed insights about their sleep, but what impact does this wealth of data actually have on our health and wellbeing?<\/p>\n
We spoke to experts about the benefits and potential drawbacks of sleep tracking and asked for their verdict.<\/p>\n
What information do these devices usually provide?<\/p>\n
\u201cThey all claim to record a lot of different parameters around sleep,\u201d says Lizzie Hill, clinical scientist and senior lecturer in sleep physiology at the University of the West of England.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re usually pretty good at measuring when you first get into bed and fall asleep, when you wake up and get out of bed in the morning and how long it takes you to get to sleep, which is called sleep latency.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most modern wearables and fitness trackers will also estimate your sleep stages.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany will give you a graph of your light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep, which is your dreaming sleep stages,\u201d notes Hill.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey will also give you an index of the fragmentation of your sleep, so how many times you\u2019re waking up during the night, or how restless you are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some newer devices provide information about even more specific metrics, such as oxygen saturation.<\/p>\n
The overall sleep score is the metric many smart wearable users focus on.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of these devices will give you an overall sleep score. However, a lot of this is almost meaningless, because it doesn\u2019t really tell you where they generate that number from,\u201d says Hill<\/p>\n
\u201cMonitoring your sleep can tell you if your sleep is fairly regular or if it varies day to day,\u201d says Hill. \u201cSo, it gives you a bit of a measure of what your sleep is doing day to day, but also what it\u2019s doing on a longer-term basis, so it can help you monitor any changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt gives you a really nice graph of what your sleep has been like for the last week, month, and even the last year, and presents this data in a really easy and accessible format.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt can help people recognise how little they are actually sleeping, which often triggers people to make more of an effort to get a longer duration of sleep,\u201d says consultant neurologist and sleep physician Dr Oliver Bernath.<\/p>\n
Hill agrees and adds: \u201cIt will give you an idea of what time you are going to bed and waking up, and this can be quite useful if you\u2019re actively trying to make changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith this information you can try to keep your bed and wake-up times more consistent, which is a good way to strengthen your internal body clock.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the big problems is that people can become obsessed with their sleep,\u201d says Hill. \u201cThere\u2019s a term called orthosomnia, which is an unhealthy obsession with monitoring your own sleep and trying to perfect it.<\/p>\n
\u201cSleep is such a delicate and sensitive process, so once you start to get obsessed with it, it can often actually make it worse. Sometimes your sleep is good as it is and doesn\u2019t need to be improved. In the process of trying to make it even better, people can actually undo the good sleep that they already have.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople sometimes panic if their readings show that for a very brief period of time their oxygen saturation level dropped in their sleep and then overestimate how problematic that is,\u201d Bernath says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get lots of referrals from people panicking who think that they have sleep apnoea when they get these low readings, so I think that causes probably a bit more anxiety than necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ll spit out lots of numbers and percentages, but the accuracy of these varies wildly from device to device,\u201d says Hill. \u201cMany of these commercial devices haven\u2019t ever been validated against gold standard measures of sleep and wake, so there\u2019s a lot of estimating going on.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom my experience, the bedtime and rise time tends to be quite good, but everything else can often be a bit of guesswork, depending on what device you\u2019re using.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMonitoring your sleep takes away some of that subjective monitoring that you would do yourself internally,\u201d notes Hill. \u201cMost of us get out of bed and think to ourselves, OK, I had a good sleep last night, or last night was really rough, but I think having a device that\u2019s giving you its perception of how you slept takes away some of that ownership.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a result, I think this might encourage people not to listen to their bodies in the way that they normally would.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sleep devices are \u201cgenerally good\u201d, says Bernath. \u201cThe accuracy and quality have improved quite a lot in the modern generation of these devices, and it\u2019s good that people are beginning to pay more attention to their sleep.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom a sleep perspective, the main two data areas I would focus on would be the total sleep time and the regularity of the timing of sleep. The rest of the data is interesting, but there\u2019s probably less you can do about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hill says sleep trackers work well for the basics, such as bedtime, wake-up time, and how long you slept. \u201cHowever, the finer detail isn\u2019t always accurate, so don\u2019t get too hung up on that.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Hill, there\u2019s no substitute for listening to your own body: \u201cIf you wake up and feel refreshed, then that\u2019s the sign that you\u2019ve had a good sleep. If you wake up after a significant number of hours of sleep and you don\u2019t feel refreshed, or you still feel tired, that might be the sign that there\u2019s something else going on.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you are concerned and think that you might have an underlying sleep problem, speak to your GP.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WEARABLE health trackers such as Fitbit, Apple Watches, and Whoop have exploded in popularity, with sleep scores becoming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":495289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[33970,38459,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-495288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-health-body","tag-health-mind","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/495289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}