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How Sleep Cycle Works
Sleep Cycle relies on your smartphone’s accelerometer to monitor movement. The idea is that you place your smartphone near you in bed and that it will register movements.
When you are in deeper sleep, especially REM sleep, it will document this stillness. When you are restless towards morning, drifting into lighter stages of sleep, it will seize on this wakefulness to alert you to get up for the day.
Pros
The interface of the app is slick. On the home page, there is an alarm clock where you can turn on the Smart Alarm. Then there are four tabs with other functions: Profile (for settings and personal info), Sleep (for sleep tracking and to set an alarm), Journal (where you can analyze your sleep quality), and Statistics (for deeper detail on your sleep data).
You can choose an alarm sound (including a favorite song) and set your snooze options. You select a 30-minute period that you wish to awaken during.
Then, each night after using it, it creates a summary on the Statistics page that includes ahypnogram(showingsleep stages) as well as your bedtime, wake time, and total andaverage sleep time.
The Journal tab will let you review your sleep quality for various periods (days, weeks, and months). It even offers a comparison to others in your country (as well as the countries with the lowest and highest sleep qualities). There are many graphs, tracking:
Additional features are unlocked and available with the Premium version, including:
Sleep Cycle is accurate at tracking the consistency of your sleep schedule. It’s similar to documenting your sleep patterns with a sleep diary and monitoring it with anactigraph. At a cost of $0 or $39.99 annually for the premium subscription, it’s much less expensive than actigraphy.
Cons
The Sleep Cycle app does have some drawbacks.
The instructions recommend that you keep your phone plugged in, which could present a choking hazard should you become wrapped in the cord (though this risk is admittedly low).
Sleep disruption: It brings your phone into the bedroom, and unless you put the phone in airplane mode, you may be bothered with calls, texts, and alerts throughout the night.
Inaccuracies: The sleep cycle hypnogram (for which the app is named) does not appear to be accurate. If you have a soft mattress pad or other bedding, the accuracy will suffer even more because movements will be missed.
Early waking: Setting a 30-minute window in which to have my alarm go off often left me getting less sleep than I desired. I would pick the later time to be the time when I absolutely had to wake up.
More often than not it would awaken me earlier, which left me with less sleep than I had desired. I never really felt that I awakened more refreshed because of the perfectly timedalarm clock.
Increased awareness: In general, having the phone in bed also made me more conscious of being awake or asleep, and this seemed to fragment my sleep.
A Word From Verywell
Therefore, though Sleep Cycle is an exciting development in inexpensive technology that may help us to monitor our sleep, it seems that it is really only accurate to track your bedtime and wake time.
It should not be used as an alternative to more sophisticated sleep studies. There are a lot of problems with its use, which give it a limited utility, and I would not recommend it for these reasons.
7 Diagnostic Tests for Sleep Disorders
2 SourcesVerywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.The New York Times/Wirecutter.The Best Sleep-Tracking App.Sleep Cycle.How Sleep Cycle works.
2 Sources
Verywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.The New York Times/Wirecutter.The Best Sleep-Tracking App.Sleep Cycle.How Sleep Cycle works.
Verywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
The New York Times/Wirecutter.The Best Sleep-Tracking App.Sleep Cycle.How Sleep Cycle works.
The New York Times/Wirecutter.The Best Sleep-Tracking App.
Sleep Cycle.How Sleep Cycle works.
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