These doubts have led to, among other things, a 2012 lawsuit against Fitbit for allegedly overestimating users’ sleep by a significant margin. Any device could overestimate one’s sleep duration if you just lay still in bed, lowering your heart rate with calm, deep breathing, but remain awake. A wearable device could mistake tiny, natural sleep movements as a sign of wakefulness, or disturbed sleep. A phone app using audio to track movement could, the worries run, mistake a partner’s movement for your own. No app or device measures sleep directly by monitoring brain activity, instead using proxies like heart rate and body movement.
Dalva Poyares and Ronaldo Piovezan, two sleep researchers based in Brazil, for instance, have been hosting presentations for medical professionals over the last year “to warn about the limitations of … these devices.”Ī fair amount of this skepticism stems from longstanding doubts about just how accurate these devices are. Many doubters, however, do think that we should perhaps lean away from them, or at least make people more aware of their limitations.
No one in the sleep science community is calling for the abolition of tracking tech. Experts like Zeitzer, however, doubt the data these trackers give has real value to many users-and suspect that tracking could actually be detrimental to good sleep. “Many in the field are appreciative of the greater attention that these trackers have brought to the issue of insufficient sleep,” says Jamie Zeitzer, a circadian physiologist at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine. Yet for all the promise of sleep trackers, a number of health pros have started to speak out against them. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play It's also why people like Roy Raymann, vice president of sleep science and scientific affairs for SleepScore Labs, argue that “sleep tracking should become a habit, just like using your bathroom scale every day” to help monitor your health. This is likely why, as of 2018, around 10 percent of Americans regularly wore sleep trackers-or fitness trackers that also monitor sleep-to bed. Potentially, they can learn and benefit more from this in-the-wild, long-term tracking than they might from a traditional sleep study: one night in a lab, where they might not sleep in the same way they would at home. They may not even realize how often they sacrifice sleep for other goals, or lose it to poor sleep hygiene-both common problems.īut if a wearable, bedside, or bed-integrated device can monitor their sleep, then the average person can get a sense of their sleep health-and make informed decisions about how optimize their sleep. Yet it is difficult for many people to get a good sense of the quality of their sleep, unconscious as they are during it. It can foster everything from waking concentration and creativity to gut recovery and immune system functionality. The promise of sleep tracking technology is powerful and-at first blush-highly convincing: Good sleep is vital for good health.
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