Top 5 Apps for Tracking Your Sleep with a Smartwatch

We all know a good night’s sleep is critical to your health. If you’re not getting enough sleep, you’re going to feel pretty bad pretty quickly. Smartphones have been offering a decent sleep analysis, but now we have smartwatches and sleep apps, it’s become obvious that a phone simply can’t do the job all that well. It can tell you when you’ve been experiencing restlessness, if and when you woke up during the night. A smartwatch can use its sensors to tell you much more in-depth information and this can help you to maintain your health.

Let’s take a look at the top 5 apps for tracking your sleep with a smartwatch.

Sleep as Android

This isn’t a free app, but you can try it for 14 days for free, then it’s $3.99 a month. It’s for WearOS device, Samsung Galaxy Watch wearers as well as those using Google Fit, Samsung Health. It’s one of the original and best, because it’s had the time to mature. It will track your sleep patterns accurately, based on your movement. This app will also play binaural tones which help you drift off to sleep. It will act as a rather stubborn alarm that requires you to input a captcha before you can turn it off.

The coolest part about this app is that it’ll talk to Phillips Hue smartlights and they’ll turn on when you’re in the lightest stage of sleep for a peaceful waking experience.

Do I Snore or Grind

Do I Snore or Grind is a wonderful sleep tracking app. It tells you if you grind your teeth as you sleep. There’s a free version of the app that will test the waters over five nights of sleep. Investing in the pro version, of course, gives you unlimited access. The other features include advice on how to stop or reduce grinding your teeth and even snoring. There’s offline support too so if you’re flying, you can use it in airplane mode (when you’re probably likely to be having a snooze). You can use the app in conjunction with sleep remedies to see if they’re working for you.

The app, on the whole, is simple. It just tells you if you grind your teeth or snore, it doesn’t track your sleep to an accurate degree, but no other apps give you the teeth grinding information, so it really depends on what you find useful if you’re having an issue.

Do I Snore or Grind is available on WearOS devices.

Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock

Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock is a premium sleep tracker app. It does have a free version with a generous set of features. It attempts to wake you when it thinks you’re at your most ready to. This app offers an analysis of your sleep, complete with a nightly graph to illustrate it. Furthermore, it also has various alarms.

The iOS version has a cool additional feature that talks to your Phillips Hue smartlights, much like Sleep as Android. (See more on best Android watches)

The subscription version is a whopping $29.99 a year (a lot, for an app). Honestly, the choice is totally down to you if you want more in-depth sleep analysis and a couple of additional alarms. Perhaps the free version is too generous because the $29.99 seems quite costly for not too much more.

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Sleep++

Sleep++ is a useful free app for Apple Watch wearers. It relies on sensors on the Apple Watch to measure the quality of your sleep as well as the duration. The better your sleep, the better your health will be as a result. It’s really key to use an app that keeps an accurate track of how you sleep and the Sleep++ app gives you accurate knowledge of your body functions during your sleep, including if your heart was at rest or not.

It has automatic and manual modes for monitoring and offers this data not only precisely, but privately, with the option to share with chosen pals. You can add this data to your health data too, which gives a better overall profile of your health.

AutoSleep

Another useful Apple Watch app alternative to Sleep++. It will automatically monitor and track the quality of your sleep as well as how long you were asleep for. It does this using your Apple Watch, but you don’t have to wear it to get the data from it, it’ll still do its job. It’ll give you a notification when you unlock your iPhone when you wake up. AutoSleep offers an intelligent but simple wizard for setting up the app, and you can customise it to suit how you sleep, for example, if you’re a light sleeper.

If you do wear your watch to bed it’ll track your heart rate and tell you if your body battery is charged. It’ll tell you how long it took you to fall asleep and will analyse the quality of your night’s sleep and give you an overall view of your night. It’ll load all this data into the Apple Health app for you.

Summary

Sleep is invaluable, so why not let an app help you out to get more? It can be wildly frustrating to toss and turn at night and not know why. The more you think about it, the less you sleep. Bad cycle. Being able to use your smartwatch with absolutely no effort from yourself can only be a good thing. You’re wearing it anyway, so let it do some analysis overnight and when you wake up, you can look at where you can make improvements the next night.

Depending on what app you’re using, and how smart your home is, your smartwatch and sleep app can team up and provide you with a way of drifting off into a peaceful and high-quality night’s sleep and then gently wake you at the most opportune moment to bring you out of it when you’re in the right stage of your sleep cycle. Not bad for something that’s not asking you to physically do anything yourself, eh?