What Types Of Sleep Monitoring Devices Are Available?

To effectively control and prevent sleep problems, the best approach is undoubtedly professional testing and comprehensive examination at a medical institution. However, due to time and cost constraints, most people need services that provide daily data monitoring and sleep advice. This has led to the development of sleep monitoring services, which currently employ three main approaches:

 

Mobile App Monitoring: Monitoring and guiding sleep through the phone's built-in sensors.

 

Wearable Device Monitoring: Monitoring data through devices such as smartwatches and smart bracelets.

 

Non-Wearable Device Monitoring: Monitoring sleep by attaching various sensors to pillows, sheets, or bedside tables.

 

Mobile Apps: Mobile apps utilize the phone's built-in accelerometer, gyroscope, and microphone to monitor sleep movements and analyze sleep quality. The app requires the phone to be close to the body and the microphone to be on, then records the entire process from lying down to falling asleep and waking up based on bed vibrations and surrounding sounds.

 

Common functions of mobile apps include: monitoring sleep onset time, monitoring deep sleep time, recording sleep talking or snoring, and recording wakefulness time. However, it's not hard to see that mobile app monitoring, in principle, uses the phone's sensors to detect bed vibrations and surrounding sounds. This is fine for single people, as there's only one person in the bed. But if couples sleep together or multiple people share a bed, the calculation becomes problematic. Furthermore, monitoring via a mobile app also raises issues like radiation and power consumption. Since there's no direct contact with the person being monitored, it's impossible to monitor data like pulse and blood oxygen saturation. Additionally, using phones, tablets, or other devices before sleep can cause blue light emitted from the screens, affecting melatonin formation and negatively impacting sleep.

 

Wearable Devices
Wearable devices have their own accelerometers. Whether it's a wristband or a watch, built-in sensors can more accurately sense your movements and biometric data.

 

Once the wearable device's built-in sensors record your movement and biometric data, they are transmitted to your phone via Bluetooth. Based on your personal information, such as age, height, and weight, the app analyzes the data and provides a series of statistical results. The specific data included in the statistics depends on the hardware capabilities of your wearable device. If your wearable device has a heart rate sensor, it can record your heart rate changes during sleep. If it has red and infrared LEDs, it can also detect blood oxygen levels. These provide auxiliary analysis for sleep monitoring and are much more accurate than phone monitoring. Moreover, wearable devices are independent and their data is not affected by the person you sleep with.

 

While this measurement method is already much more accurate than a phone, a fitness tracker or watch is far from sufficient to thoroughly understand how your brainwaves operate during sleep or accurately analyze what causes insomnia. On the other hand, professional medical equipment is often more expensive and inconvenient to carry. Wearable devices solve the portability problem, allowing us to easily monitor sleep quality and make targeted improvements based on our sleep patterns.

 

Non-wearable devices: Common non-wearable devices include smart mattresses, smart pillows, smart bed straps, and smart clips. These smart hardware products, designed specifically for sleep monitoring, generally have built-in high-sensitivity sensors that record the user's sleep quality, heart rate, breathing, and snoring.

 

Users can view the analyzed sleep report on their phone via Bluetooth. The biggest weakness of wearable devices is their inability to record and analyze breathing, which is precisely the advantage of non-wearable devices. Non-wearable devices also monitor sleep quality based on individual movement. Although they are placed on the bed, they are in close contact with the person, making the movement records more accurate.