Sleep Routine: Tracker and Alarm Clock, $7 per month or $60 per year (iOS/Android): You don’t necessarily need a new gadget, as there are a variety of sleep tracking apps. I tested the sleep routine on my iPhone 14 Pro. The app provides a nightly report that breaks down your sleep into awake, light, deep, and REM sleep. The results appear to be accurate and roughly match Superman’s ring of air. You can add notes to help it better understand your sleep, and it builds an analysis of your sleep patterns and displays your statistics over time. The smart alarm clock function gently wakes you up. You can try the Sleep Routine for a week before you need to subscribe. question? The app can be a bit unstable. Several times during the week, I get an error message in the morning with no reported or very short sleep recorded. Annoyingly, there is no indication of the reason for the failure.
Withings ScanWatch 2 for $350: Wear the Withings ScanWatch 2 (7/10, recommended by WIRED) to bed, and you’ll get a sleep score out of 100 in the morning. It covers the same four stages as other trackers (awake, REM, shallow, and deep) but has a PPG sensor for measuring breathing rate. It can also track your heart rate, body temperature, and blood oxygen levels. ScanWatch 2 provides a wealth of data and recommendations in the Withings app. But some may find it bulky and uncomfortable to sleep on, and it had problems distinguishing between light sleep and when I was awake in bed.
Google Nest Hub 2nd Gen is on sale for $79: The second-generation Nest Hub uses radar to track your sleep, which means you don’t need to wear anything, but it also has microphones to track snoring, sleep talking, and other nighttime sounds. I love having the Nest Hub on my nightstand for smart home control, family photos, and listening to sleep sounds or podcasts in bed, but sleep tracking consistently overestimates my REM stages and misses waking periods recorded by other trackers. When it comes to using multiple trackers at the same time, the Nest Hub is an outlier.
Muse S Gen 2 headband for $400: The headband features sensors that track brain activity, similar to an electroencephalogram (EEG), as well as accelerometers and gyroscopes, as well as PPG sensors that measure heart rate and blood circulation. It’s primarily a meditation aid designed to help you relax, but it can also track your sleep, recording your heart rate, breathing, time to fall asleep, and your activity level to give you an overall sleep score. Unfortunately, I found it uncomfortable to wear and often woke up to find sleep tracking failing, usually because I took it off at night. It’s also too expensive.
Size Nightbud for only $285: While combining earbuds with sleep tracking is a smart idea, wearing the Nightbuds makes it harder for me to fall asleep. These tiny earbuds plug into a curved control unit designed to sit on the back of your head, and they’re relatively comfortable since everything is covered in flexible silicone. The companion app plays meditations, soothing sounds and sleep stories to help you distract or drown out your snoring partner. You can also stream your own content via Bluetooth connection. Sleep tracking is limited, showing the familiar four stages, sleep efficiency, and consistency, but I often woke up to find them falling off during the night, shortening my sleep tracking time. I’m about to test the Philips sleep headphones, but they appear to be a rebranded version of these headphones.
Biostrap Kairos sells for $900: This lightweight wrist-worn bracelet features a PPG sensor and accelerometer to track your heart rate, respiration and HRV. It tracks sleep divided into awake, light, and deep sleep (rapid eye movement sleep will be added soon) and combines it with your biometric data to give you a sleep score. It also surveys the quality of your sleep and how refreshed you feel each morning, and asks you how you feel when you wake up and before you fall asleep. It looks pretty accurate, but it’s designed for researchers, medical professionals, and organizations that want to monitor employee health or study the impact of new services or products, so it’s out of reach for most people.