It was last week that I read about a research on sleeping problems among university students. It proved that almost 60% of all students suffer from poor sleeping quality. Insomnia was found to have a huge impact on the students’ daily life and even affect their grade point average (Schlarb et al., 2017).
As I was quite shocked about this, I started googling for existing inventions that could possibly solve sleeping issues and found these products that can analyse your sleeping patterns during the night. Take Withings, a Nokia company that launched this sleep tracking mat. This mat can be placed under your mattress and will track your heart rate, measure your perspiration levels, detect snoring sounds and monitor your sleep cycles during the period you are (trying to be) asleep.
Another interesting aspect about the Withings sleep tracker is that it has developed into an Internet of Things device by being integrated with IFTTT – a free platform that allows you to connect all of your apps and devices to each other (IFTTT, 2018).In case of the Withings Sleep tracker, IFTTT allows you to not only connect your health app to the sleep tracker, it enables you to improve your sleeping environment by integrating it to your light dimmers and thermostat.
Why would you do this? Well, if you are concerned about your health and suffer from fatigue issues or other sleeping disorders than this could be a perfect way for you to improve your overall health. Knowing more about your sleeping habits can help you make more deliberate decisions regarding your daily life, which in turn can improve your night’s rest. The overall idea of these kind of products is that with extra information about your sleeping patterns and the quality of your sleep, you can begin to make changes in your daily lifestyle in order to improve it, which should have a positive effect on both your mental and physical well-being (Digital trends, 2018).
As I would definitely try this, I’m curious if there’s any of you who can relate to this and perhaps already tried a device like the Withings sleep tracker.
Sources:
- https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/best-sleep-trackers/
- Schlarb, A. A., Friedrich, A., & Claßen, M. (2017). Sleep problems in university students – an intervention. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 13, 1989–2001. http://doi.org/10.2147/NDT.S142067
Hi, IIse. It is a very interesting topic for me since I also suffer from insomnia sometimes. Theoretically speaking, Sleep trackers should provide a better way to know more about our sleeping habits and give us a direction on how to improve our sleeping. However, I have to question the practical utility of sleep trackers. I have a health tracking watch but I closed the sleep tracking function after using it a few months. Because it gave too much pressure for me to ensure that I have eight hours of sleep per day. Alarms or notifications of a sleep tracking device, oppositely, increase my negative feelings. Therefore, in my opinion, how to eliminate or decrease the potential negative effects should be also considered when designing and developing a sleep tracking device (A relevant study on this topic can be found from https://massivesci.com/articles/sleep-tracker-healthy-bad-sleep/)
Super interesting!
As I also have troubles falling asleep sometimes, I am quite interested in this topic and possible remedies.
However, I think there is still a very long way to go, as sleeping problems are mostly related to mental health (e.g. stress) instead of physical issues.
A lot of devices today track sleeping quality. For example, I’ve got a Fitbit which also tracks your heartbeat, hours of (light/heavy) sleep, but it probably does not offer such detailed information and connections to other devices as the Nokia device does. Maybe I should buy such a mattress 😉
Hi Ilse,
As a fellow student I totally understand why you find this topic interesting and would want to try a device as such. I think most students can relate to sleeping problems and we probably all hope such a device can help us improve on this. However, I do agree with the previous comments of Yuan and Sophie that the Withings sleep tracker does not necessarily solve sleeping problems. As Sophie mentions, the causes of sleeping problems are mostly related to physical or mental health issues. In order to have a better night rest, we should start by solving these.
Withings sleep tracker is indeed a good way to observe our sleeping habits, but it can also further influence them. It is namely proven that EMFs (electromagnetic fields) negatively influence our sleep and our bodies, an increasing probem in a world in which modern technology use grows exponentially. So if you want to solve your sleeping problems I would suggest to start with natural ways to do so and remove all electronic devices from your bedroom. For more information I suggest to read articles like the followiing: https://justhealthysleep.com/dangers-sleeping-with-emfs/
Good luck!
Interesting article! I personally do experience sleep problems sometimes and I have tried different apps, which didn’t help me. A while ago, I read an interesting article about ‘Orthosomina’ (the obsessive tracking of the number of hours you sleep). In this article (http://jcsm.aasm.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=30955), the researcher looked at the relationship between sleep apps and a bad night sleep. According to the researcher, these apps increasingly have a negative effect on our sleep pattern, which is because people put too much pressure on the exact number of hours of sleep that the app recommends. The issue with these sleep trackers arises when people rely on them completely, and when their sleep data isn’t perfect, they end up diagnosing themselves with problems, and that is exactly what I did. When I thought I had a good night sleep and my sleep application showed me I had only 4 hours sleep, I felt really bad about it and eventually I suddenly felt tired. Therefore, I think these applications are not the answer to sleep problems.
Thank you for sharing Ilse, it is a very interesting post!
Sleep and rest is indeed the foundation of our lives and studies have shown time after time that getting enough and quality rest time, postively affects the quality of life and our effectivity at work. Personally, I am also struggling with my sleep patterns and I genuinely believe that IoT solutions Withing and full integration of all IoT devices can have a great potential to positively influence the health of the users.
However, I must say that I can speak from experience that before we can reach full and seamless integration of all IoT devices (within the home) in order to capture the potential synergy of several IoT devices for health monitoring, there must exist a standard infrastructure for all IoT devices within the home. Previously I had conducted a research and spoken with experts about this matter to use IoT generated data for other purposes and for this instance, it is the health monitoring and improvement purposes. The critique that was delivered by the expert was that the data that is collected nowadays by the IoT applications is too fragmented, this implies that some people have a smart device here and there which does not give a complete view of the usage of the user. In order to make this data really useful and reach full integration. Therefore, all IoT devices should comply with one data capturing standard so they can fully exchange the data with each other and give a more complete and better view of the lifestyle of the user. Only then, the full benefits of IoT applications can be reached in my opinion. I would like to hear what you think of this.