Sleep is one of the most important factors contributing to our health and happiness. And yet it’s often the most neglected — or at least the most elusive. Now there’s a tool outside of expensive sleep clinics that could help you improve your sleep quality: an app called Sleep Rate.
Sleep Rate was developed by CEO Uli Gal-Oz and Chief Scientist Dr. Anda Baharav, both of whom have a combined 20 years of clinical sleep medicine experience. The app works by using data from a heart rate monitor and your iPhone’s microphone to monitor your quality of sleep and capture any noise that may disturb you during the night (this includes you or your partner’s snoring). After you’ve woken up, the app sends the data to the cloud for analysis using licensed algorithms developed at The Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine.
After getting a sense of your typical sleep patterns for five nights, you can get a personalized report that offers recommendations on how to improve your slumber. That’s a step above traditional activity trackers that only let you track your quality of sleep based on movement using an accelerometer. As many have noted, this isn’t an ideal way to get a sense of your overall sleep quality.
Poor sleep stems from one of three causes, according to Gal-Oz: medical (things like sleep apnea), environmental noises, and for most, psycho-physiological problems (things like anxiety level, stress, your biological clock, or insomnia). Using a combination of a heart rate monitor, audio monitoring, and questions about your lifestyle, Sleep Rate helps identify whether your snores are harmless and regular, or waking you up and should be addressed by a physician.
Using your heart rate to analyze your sleep also helps paint a far more accurate picture. During non-REM sleep, your breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure lower and get more regular. During REM sleep, your heart rate is more variable.
When I tried the app, I found I often got much better sleep than I initially perceived. When you launch the app, each day you answer a short questionnaire about your napping and stress habits. Then you strap on your heart rate monitor and hit the sack. Sleeping with a heart rate monitor on isn’t the most comfortable thing, but you get used to it. Since I tend to roll around in my sleep, I even managed to wiggle out of it at one point and had to re-strap it back on. In the morning, you rate your quality of sleep and Sleep Rate starts crunching the data.
The app displays your results from each night in a dashboard. You can view sleep quality and sleep duration and view each on a weekly or monthly basis. Below a pie chart breakdown of your awake, light sleep, deep sleep, and REM time, the app lists stats like how long it took for you to fall asleep, how many times you woke up, and the average length of those awakenings. You even get a breakdown of “snoring events” and environment noises that took place during your sleep, and which ones actually woke you up.
Lack of sleep contributes to a whole host of negatives — poor cognitive and physical behavior as well as long-term health issues like weight gain, stroke, and high blood pressure. It can wreak havoc on your immune system too. Poor sleepers cost the country 63 billion per year in lost productivity.
If you think you might have any sort of sleep issue, or you’re just curious to track how well you reallysleep, you can grab the app, a Polar heart rate monitor, a sleep assessment, and one year of sleep monitoring for $100 ($80 if you’ve got your own heart rate monitor).
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