Welcome to this article you gonna read about is the best sleep app for apple watch. The answer to this question is the sleep cycle app. The sleep cycle app on the apple watch against this small sleep EEG device that’s being used in several research projects. I work both of these for six nights and I will directly compare their results as always.
The sleep cycle app is the Best sleep App for the Apple watch
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For those of you who are not familiar with the app called sleep cycle. It was originally developed as an app to be run on an iPhone or Android device. If you use it on a smartphone it will use your movements as measured on your smartphone to detect your sleep stages. However, since may of 2020 sleep cycle has also been available for the apple watch. I tried to find out which sensors the app uses to monitor your sleep. But I could not find out for sure the app does show your heart rate in the morning when you track your sleep. But I’m not sure if heart rate or heart rate variability are actively used in the algorithm.
I suspect it’s likely just motion since this will make it easier for them to adapt our original algorithm. But is pure speculation the sleep cycle app does not track the classical sleep stages. Which are rem sleep light sleep deep sleep and awake instead it tracks the depth of your sleep. In the form of a graph going from awake at the top to sleep in the middle. And to deep sleep at the bottom, this makes some sense as the main goals. That sleep cycle lists on their website are one to better understand your sleep patterns.
The sleep cycle app is available on Apps Store
And to have your alarm go off the moment you’re in light sleep. This would make it easier for you to wake up and make you less groggy now. Let’s get to the test I will compare the results of the sleep cycle app on apple watch to the sleep stages as I track them. The EEG device measures brain waves and muscle movements. It’s called the Capitoline z-max and is being used by several of my colleagues. In scientific studies, if you’re interested in this device I will link it below.
Now I manually went through the recording of each of the eggs and scored each part of the night for the different sleep stages. Now analyzing the data from the sleep cycle app was actually not completely straightforward I could not export. The full graph you see in the app in a usable format I ended up using a really handy. An online tool called web plot digitizer to extract the raw data. Basically, I had to take screenshots of the graphs, and using the tool I was able to extract the raw data.
best sleep app for apple watch in 2021
Finally, with the infrared recording, I can actually check what my movements were like during the night. And see if the sleep cycle app correctly predicted the moments. That I was awake let’s first have a look at the six individual nights. Where I compare the graphs from the sleep cycle app to the different sleep stages I went through each night. Here we have the first night where on top I plotted my sleep stages with the time of night on the horizontal axis. And the line indicating what sleep stage I was in.
So I started the night being awake then I had some light sleep some deep sleep. A little bit of lightly began and then went into rem sleep. And so on and on the bottom I plodded my knight according to the sleep cycle app. Now supposedly the lower the value in the sleep cycle app the deeper the sleep. So let’s first have a look at deep sleep that’s what I’ve highlighted in purple here. And as you can see in the moments where I had deeper sleep indeed the scores. According to the sleep cycle app are lower however we can also see that at later points in the night. Where I no longer had any deep sleep.