Sleep trackers could actually make your bedtime worse

The use of sleep trackers, whether it's fitness supervisors, smart watches or appliances installed under your mattress, can have a negative impact on your time of sleep.

According to a host of sleep experts who believe that being obsessed with getting perfect sleep scores and inaccurate data provided by these devices could actually encourage problems such as insomnia.

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S addressing the New York Times, Dr. Kelly Baron, medical director of the Behavioral Behavioral Medicine Program at the University of Utah, explained that sleep monitoring can be helpful in identifying trends of your sleep. But she also noticed that patients complained about their sleep scores and showed their concern when they had not slept enough, for example.

Dr. Seema Khosla, Medical Director of the North Dakota Sleep Center, also explained that clinicians have trouble keeping track of available devices and applications that promise to monitor our sleep. While she saw these devices creating a greater awareness of the value of a good night's sleep, she also mistrusted the inaccurate data and the increased anxiety that they caused.

A case study conducted in 2017 revealed that patients spent too much time in bed to get perfect scores, which would worsen insomnia. This need for perfect sleep has been called orthosomnia. He also found that wearable devices that rely on movement tracking (most often) to record sleep can often overestimate sleep. Although the addition of heart rate data and respiratory rate readings in the combination can offer richer data at bedtime, which are often also based on estimates, which may not be as reliable.

Fitbit is one of the companies that makes sleep monitoring one of the core products of almost all of its portable devices. Dr. Conor Heneghan, director of research at Fitbit, defended the feature film claiming that it gave people a "tool to understand their own sleep health". Heneghan also believes that Fitbit devices can provide reliable estimates and can help users understand the factors that can contribute to a bad night's sleep, such as drinking alcohol and exercising.

Almost all the big names in clothing technology offer sleep tracking, and many are exploring how their devices can be used to detect signs associated with serious sleep disturbances such as sleep apnea. Most sleep detectors are not approved by the FDA because they are considered low risk devices. They will need to look for the appropriate regulatory approvals to be able to provide this serious health surveillance information.

As sleep is increasingly on the wearable agenda, monitoring the reliability of data and the value of its offerings will only intensify. It is therefore incumbent upon businesses to incorporate this technology into their bed-friendly devices so that users can better understand what they are capable of and what their limitations are.

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