There are many reasons to get enough quality sleep and there are just as many sleep trackers to help you keep track of your sleep. The problem is that they’re expensive. If you’re on a budget or simply won’t pay several hundred dollars for tracking sleep, keep reading. I’m going to show you the best sleep tracker for Android and it’s a fraction of the cost of the others.
Why track sleep?
There are many advantages to getting enough sleep. However, sometimes life and responsibilities can get in the way of getting enough. That’s where tracking helps. You might not realize how little sleep you’re actually getting. Tracking gives you the data to know exactly how much you’re sleeping. Tracking can also show you the quality of your sleep. Maybe you’re tossing and turning all night so the hours you are sleeping aren’t as productive as they could be.
Best Sleep Tracking App For Android
Sleep As Android is an excellent Android app for sleep tracking. Unsurprisingly, it’s very popular and has over 10 million downloads from the Play store. It’s free to try, and you can add functionality through in-app purchases. It’s easily worth the few bucks it takes to enable those other features. I’ve used it for about 5 years.
Smart Wake Up
The smart wake up feature is the best feature of the app. There are different phases of your sleep cycle and it determines the optimal time to wake you up. You set the time you need to wake up along with a smart wake period. For example, if you need to wake up by 6:00 am and use a smart wake period of 30 minutes, the alarm will wake you up between 5:30 am and 6:00 am. The app monitors your movement during sleep and determines which phase of sleep you’re in. When there’s a good time to wake you up within that smart wake window, the alarm goes off.
It seems to figure this out based on movement. When you’re in that half-awake daze right before you wake up, you move around a bit. I’ve noticed as soon as I roll over or move during the smart wake window, my alarm goes off. I’ve also learned that staying still gives me a few more minutes of sleep. Maybe that’s cheating, but I like to call it tracking hacking.
The app needs sensors to monitor your movement. Conveniently, your phone has sensors. If you place your phone next to your pillow. If you wake up earlier than your partner you can put the phone on vibrate so you don’t wake them up. The big problem with this is that you can accidentally knock the phone off to the floor and miss the alarm. Luckily, there’s a better way.
Smartwatch Integration
There are several smartwatches compatible with Sleep As Android. One of the main benefits is that the watch monitors your sleep and movements while your phone safely charges on the nightstand. Most smartwatches also support a silent alarm and vibrate on your wrist. This is a game changer if you don’t want to wake anyone else up.
Other Features
Sleep As Android has more than alarm and smart wake up features. The first thing you see when you open the app now is your Sleep Score. It shows how long you slept last night and the irregularity of your sleep, which is a measure of how good you are at going to bed and waking up at the same time each day. Finally, it lists the percentage of your sleep that’s deep sleep. If you have any alarms set, they display just above the Sleep Score.
Another of my favorite features is how it calculates your sleep deficit. The light green line shows the sleep duration each night. The red line is my cumulative sleep deficit. If you click on the Deficit section you can drill down and change some parameters. For me, this view really helps. Sometimes when you’re running a large sleep deficit like I am in the screenshot it explains a lot as far as mood and concentration go.
Today
If you drill down into the Today section, you get a great look at your sleep. The two graphs show how much you moved around while sleeping and the stage of sleep you were in. There are some options here that I don’t use, like snoring tracking. You can see that I went to sleep at 2:00 am and slept for 6 hours and 45 minutes, 3 hours and 43 minutes of that was a deep sleep. I was up late finishing up my Fingbox Review. Please check out that review too!
Advice
If you’re doing something that’s not good for you, Sleep As Android gives you advice. In my case, I need a better sleep schedule. It even helps you get better. If you set that your ideal sleep duration is 7 hours and you have an alarm set for 6 am then the app gives you a reminder at 11 pm to go to bed. This is really nice if you’re like me and try to get some work done after the kids go to bed but get lost in your work and end up staying up until 2 am.
Best Sleep Tracker For Android
Sleep As Android plus Pebble is the best sleep tracker for android. The app is regularly updated and keeps getting better. There are also a lot of other features that I don’t use. You can share your sleep details on Facebook or Twitter. I’m not sharing my sleep data there, but I would appreciate it if you followed Tech For Non-Techies there. It has lullabies and integrates with Spotify. You can also add CAPTCHA verification to turn off your alarm. If you’re bad about hitting snooze, this will help you break that habit. There are still several other features. I recommend checking out Sleep As Android and trying it for a couple of weeks. They do a great job explaining what things mean and how it works. I would try to explain it here, but I need to get to sleep.