No doubt, technology is pretty cool now. But now your wrist also acts as cool by wearing a fitness tracker. We though that fitness tracker only tracks our number of steps or calories we burn. But no, this is not only things they do.
Fitness tracker tracks our steps that we take an every day and the fat we burn, but a fitness tracker also tracks your sleep habits. Also, some new or unique trackers claim that that they measure the time of each stage of your sleeping.
The great feature of a fitness tracker is to evaluate the general health of a person by a sleep monitor, which scan the quality of your sleep by tracking your sleep movement and translating them into a sleep data.
You will see a detailed report in your fitness tracker with the help of a graph, which tells how much and how well you sleep at night?
Beside telling you how much you take steps today or how much you burn your calories, fitness tracker tracks your sleep patterns and provides a lot of important information about your health, even when you are un-conscious.
How even a fitness tracker track sleep? Means how even they do that? So, here is the answer to this.
How Do Fitness Trackers Track Sleep?
1. Accelerometers
A Fitness tracker tracks the sleep of a person with the use of accelerometers. It is a group of sensors that detect the movement of a user, including the speed or direction of each movement.
Many researchers or professionals tell or may be warned, don’t put too much trust on these types of sensors. There is no doubt that they tell the sleep pattern of a user or tell whether that asleep or awake. But they can be inaccurate.
2. Actigraphy
Another important term about how a fitness tracker monitors sleep is an actigraphy. An actigraphy is a method of utilizing a device for tracking the movement of a user to identify the sleep amount of them. When it’s a time of your sleeping at night then, turning ON the sleep mode of a tracker, and its ready to track your sleep motions.
On the next morning, you will be able to see your all sleep data as a device translated these sleep movements with the help of a graph. You will get a great idea about this working when you try to edit your sleep timings. During your sleep time, when you were reanalyzed awake and tell the software that you were really asleep, this time of awake also track by the fitness tracker.
- Actigraphy is doing work with the use of an actigraph wrist-worn device that tracks the movement of sleep. It is usually wearing at home or always gives you a feel of comfort. It has software that tracks the movements of moments of the user’s wakefulness and asleep.
- This actigraph device mostly recommend to those people who have a sleep disorder, and it is a more convenient way for them to track user’s sleeping pattern rather than record their sleep times in a lab. This device is also recommending by the doctor, so they easily get the details of their patient who have a sleeping disorder. It is actually worn 24 hours a day and 7 days a week to track the sleep based on the movements.
3. Polysomnography
The most accurate way to track sleep is polysomnography or PSG. This device requires a person to sleep in a lab where waves of a brain examine by an EEG. In an EEG, the electrodes are attached to the scalp, which measures your brain waves.
It is the most convenient way to track the accurate sleep pattern and most recommend by experts because of their accuracy. PSG is a standard of an actigraphy and uses to compare the accuracy of actigraphy.
A Fitness tracker is a wearable device and worn in day and night to track the steps, the burned calories, a heart rate, or the other fitness related metrics. But instead of these, it also provides sleep data of the user. Even though they may be providing the wrong data or may have the inaccuracy in their result but no doubt that the sleep tracking functions of fitness are still helpful.
By tracking the pattern of sleep, it makes aware user about possible sleep disorders and other general health issues through sleep quality. They really help us to aware of our general sleep patterns.