It can crash your mood, decrease your energy levels, even damage your skin as there will be eye bags when you lack sleep. And if you lack sleep for a long term time then it can seriously affect your health consequences.
And the fact is that many of us are not getting enough sleep because of many reasons like a busy schedule, or any other reason. If you are one of these people, then a sleep tracker might be the thing you want.
What is a Smartwatch?
Smartwatches could be called a computer or smartphones in mini sizes and are wearable.
This one provides you with a touch screen and is connected to your smartphone through an app.
Smartwatches have functionality closer to a smartphone-like they contain mobile apps, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, FM radio, GPS, and much more. They have rechargeable batteries, possess a camera, a thermometer, etc. Most of them even have a heart rate monitor that will record your heart rate and other vital signs.
Smartwatches also come in handy if you are a fitness lover. They contain apps that will count how many steps you have walked all day and how many calories you have burnt by walking.
Other functions that are most used by us in smartphones like texting, emails, and browsing through the internet, can also be done in smartwatches.
These gadgets are compatible with iOS and Android. Many smartwatches are compatible with both OSs.
How does a SmartWatch function?
Now that you have been informed of what a smartwatch is, we will tell you what it does now. We have already told you that you can perform all the fundamental functions on your smartwatch that you do on your smartphone. They even allow you to pay your bills because of the NFC chip inserted.
Most of the current iterations of smartwatches aren’t wholly standalone devices, simply because they lack an Internet connection.
So many of the watches are designed to link directly with other devices that do have Internet connectivity, namely your smartphone.
But some of these gadgets would not need you to have your smartphone near you or in your pocket all the time. These smartwatches are stand-alone which means that they can function easily without the need for a smartphone.
Like if you go out on a walk or to jog in the park, you do not need the smartphone in your pocket, you can easily read your texts, check for an important email or even receive your calls.
For people who like to swim just as a hobby or are professional swimmers, developers have come out with waterproof smartwatches. The waterproof smartwatches can easily track your activity underwater as well.
People who are not even a swimmer should still consider buying water-resistant smartwatches, as they will enable them to jog, walk or run even when they are sweating or it is raining because they will stay safe and still do their activity.
What do Smartwatches do?
All of the smartwatches either they are meant to be used in daily life or is for some specific purpose, offer some basic standard features:
Notifications
As you know your smartphone is aware you notifies you of important occasions or happenings, the smartwatches will do the same for you but in a different manner. There are basic types of ways your smartwatch will notify or alert you.
Some of these smartwatches might only reflect the notifications that were delivered on your smartphone, while others will provide you with something only smartwatches can do.
Take an example of the newest Apple watch which features a fall sensor. Pretty smart huh? If you fall while you are wearing the watch, the watch will be able to sense your following motion.
Applications
Beyond displaying notifications from your phone, a smartwatch is only as good as the apps it supports.
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The ecosystems of these apps vary, they either belong to Apple or Google’s habitat.
Without the option of adding other apps, smartwatches that serve a specific purpose like they are used in hiking or diving, they only support certain apps that are required to reach that purpose that they are designed for.
Media management and entertainment
Most smartwatches paired with smartphones can manage media playback for you.
Take your Airpods for an instance, Like you are jogging in the park and listening to your favorite music on your Airpods connected to your iPhone. With a smartwatch connected to your iPhone, you can easily change or skip any track or adjust the volume to a suitable level.
The latest models of these smartwatches can store your favorite tracks or even full-length albums, so you can play your music anywhere you want with the Bluetooth headphones connected which of course do not trouble you with the wires.
Or Suppose that you are walking or you are in the middle of something and suddenly you want to watch a YouTube video that your friends were talking about. With this convenient and wonderful technology, you will just have to make one or two clicks to watch that video.
Reply to texts by voice and receive calls
Wearing your smartwatch will eliminate the need for your carrying your smartphone in your pocket.
You can receive calls or reply to texts as most of these smartwatches support voice dictation. You can talk to someone with ease who is sitting miles away.
This feature comes in handy specifically when you can not carry or keep your phone in your hand like for instance when you are in your yoga class or in a situation where carrying your phone would be too awkward.
For tasks like these, the smartwatches will never be able to outrun the need of the smartphone, but they can prove to be very helpful in a small number of times when carrying your is going to be unpleasant or difficult.
Good fitness trackers
If you are someone who likes to do sport as a side hobby or you are a hardcore athlete, you should go for the fitness bands but most of the smartwatch still provides yours with this feature.
Fitness tracking is present in most smartwatches as an elemental feature, which will help you to keep up with your fitness resolutions and goals.
Through we have fitness bands dedicated for that purpose you can still consider choosing the smartwatches to make up to your needs.
It can count steps, distance, calories, heart rate, pulse rate, sleep and some even go beyond this to calculate other important metrics you might need.
Garmin watches are especially good fitness-based devices but most offer fitness tracking features these days as the technology is much cheaper to manufacture than it once was. There are even models now that are completely waterproof and perfect for swimmers.
GPS
Most of the smartwatches contain the GPS feature so you can have tracked down by your location or you can receive alerts that would be specific to your location.
Nice battery life
Modern smartwatches run on Lithium-ion batteries which will allow you to get through the day, with of course normal usage and still might provide you with some juice left to get on with.
The battery life varies depending on the developer, like Apple smartwatches will provide up to 18 hours of battery life, charged for a single time and of normal usage, whereas the ones provided by Pebble get you through at least two to three days while charged a single time.
Find your lost phone or keys
If you are someone who is always forgetting things, careless, or in your head most of the time, then you might need a smartwatch as you might often forget where you put your phone or keys.
There is nothing more annoying than losing your keys or phone. Thankfully a smartwatch can render this inconvenience a thing of the past. Most of the smartwatches are provided with the “find phone” feature.
Simply connect your smartphone or any other device with your smartwatch, and it will enable you to ring your phone through your watch whenever to find out where you left it.
So have you lost your phone or forgotten where you put it? Click a few buttons on your smartwatch and track your phone or any other device down.
Travel partner
If you are someone who has the craze to discover and visit a new place and travel most of the time, smartwatches would be something you should have, as they are someone who knows more about what you need to know.
The Apple Watch, for example, can deliver different vibrations to your wrist to tell you if you should turn right or left when following directions.
Instead of constantly looking at a smartphone, for example, you can follow an invisible guide that informs you where to go. Look up and take in the scenery instead of staring at a map.
First of all, you should know what a sleep tracker is and how they work. Many different sleep trackers come in different shapes and sizes.
There are familiar wearables like smartwatches, fitness bands, bed stands gadgets and pads that you put under your mattress to track your sleep.
The wearable trackers like smartwatches and fitness bands usually track your movement and your heart rate. And the bed stand gadgets sleep trackers use echolocation technology to detect your movement and breathing as well.
Overall, the data that is collected through these devices provides you information about how much you sleep, for how long you are in deep, light, or REM sleep.
It checks and informs you if your breathing rate and heart rate are normal or not and how many times you wake up in the night.
With all these features, then you can adjust or change your habits accordingly to improve your schedule and get more sleep.
If you buy a personal sleep tracker, it can provide you with an interesting insight into the very important third part of your life when you sleep.
If you want to know about what quality of sleep you get, then the sleep tracker is a must-have for you. It provides you with useful information about your sleep so with that information you can take steps to improve it.
Top Sleep-Tracking Smartwatches 2024
FITBIT VERSA 2
This device is said to be the best wearable sleep tracker with reliable accuracy and it also has Alexa built-in.
This Fitbit Versa 2 is one of the most favorite smartwatches to a lot of people among the other smartwatches introduced over the years.
When it comes to the measurements, the Fitbit Versa 2 is generally so accurate in measurements. This device can easily tell you if you are lying on the bed reading or sleeping, how regularly you wake up in the night, and at what time you finally wake up in the morning.
Fitbit Versa also seems so remarkably reliable when it comes to fitness tracking. It counts your steps nicely, it detects if your pulse is at a different intensity in different levels of training and it automatically enables exercise type tracking.
The Fitbit Versa 2 provides you with a decent sleep stage tracking estimate. According to the accuracy of the basic sleep data, heart rate data and movement provide this optimism about the sleep tracking estimate.
It has now the built-in Alexa voice assistant in this new Versa, which is considered as a key addition to this Fitbit Versa 2.
The built-in Alexa voice assistant is great being able to dictate and write messages with the help of your voice, it can make general searches for you, it can set alarms, timers, reminders, etc all for you with your voice commands.
These useful features have made this Fitbit Versa 2 the best smartwatch from Fitbit to date.
With the help of the excellent Fitbit Application, it presents you with each of your sleep stages in a detailed, clear, and easy-to-understand graph. This application compares the time you spend in the sleep stages to your demographic.
With this Fitbit Versa 2, you can set reminders to stick to a sleep schedule of yours and even reminders to stay active every hour of your day. These things might be helpful for you to improve your sleep.
And as this Fitbit Versa, 2 is an activity tracker as well it is very useful for the guys who are into gyms. As fitness freaks people are very conscious about their pulse, calories burned, and exercise timers. This Fitbit Versa 2 can do all these things for you easily.
If you are a swimmer, then Fitbit Versa 2 can help you there as well. You can take it at a depth of up to 50 meters.
The Fitbit Versa 2 offers you a 1.4 inches screen with an OLED display panel which is very bright and provides you vibrant colors even if you are standing in the sunlight. It looks super great when wearing it. And another one of the most impressive facts of this Fitbit Versa 2 is its battery. It has an excellent battery life which can last up to 6 days easily.
This Fitbit Versa 2 is much more accurate in the sleep tracking process. The tracking of heart rate and motion tracking is very much reliable when compared to some other sleep trackers.
Many other features can help you in improving your sleep and your schedule like reminders and encouragement, etc.
The growing number of applications and features on this Fitbit Versa 2 is really impressive for people who are into fitness tracking and sleep tracking.
If you want to keep yourself updated with modern technology and have an Alexa in-built voice assistant on your wrist that can do some great work for you on voice commands only then the Fitbit Versa 2 is an excellent choice for a wearable sleep tracker to have one with you.
FITBIT ALTA HR
This smartwatch is an affordable and slim wearable sleep tracker.
In many aspects and many ways, this smartwatch the Fitbit Alta HR feels and looks like a small in size version of the Charge 2 and Charge 3 smartwatches from Fitbit.
The chief benefit and impressive thing about this thinner, glossy, and modest design of this Fitbit Alta HR are that you don’t notice it so much when you are on the bed trying to sleep. It doesn’t cause you any problem or discomfort to you.
The slimmer design of this Fitbit Alta HR has a downside though. It comes with fewer applications, fewer features, and no activity tracking.
And not having these things, results in one benefit which is that you get a huge battery life of up to 7 days. This is a really impressive battery life without any doubt.
All the people and researchers who have worn this Fitbit Altra HR for a term of time to test its new sleep tracking software reviewed that this Fitbit Alta HR was generally very impressive inaccuracy.
If this Fitbit Alta HR is compared to other sleep trackers then there were only some occasions on which the Fitbit Alta HR didn’t correctly calculate the resting time in bed for sleep. But it did a great job at recording the times a person gets up in the night.
The new sleep breakdown on the App is also really good. As with the Fitbit Versa, it is great to the breakdown down your sleep with such details.
The vibrating reminders are very impressive and very useful as well. They help the people to stay active in each hour of the day and to stick to the target bedtime I have set on the application of this smartwatch.
When it is the time for bed that you have chosen then this little vibration reminder will help you remind that it is time for bed now.
And then if you process yourself according to the reminders you have set and if you are having a good and regular sleep routine then it is a really good chance you achieved.
The fundamental key to having good sleep is to have a regular and good sleep routine, this device the Fitbit Alta HR can make a big difference in your life. Not just a big difference, but I should mention that a “GOOD” BIG DIFFERENCE.
It is not that accurate when it comes to exercises and fitness workouts. This makes it not the ideal smartwatch if you are into fitness tracking a lot.
But If you are not into fitness that much and don’t regularly do intense workout sessions, but it is the sleep tracking that interests you most then there are a lot of things you are going to like about the Fitbit Alta HR.
But if you are attracted to the smartwatches which have beautiful and a little larger screen, a great number of applications and features then I must say that this Fitbit Alta HR is not the type of wearable you should go for.
Withings Sleep
A Withings sleep offers you an easy way to track your sleep without really wearing a fitness tracker.
This is a more specialized gadget than the Withings Move, the Withings Sleep is a pad that you can easily slip under your mattress to keep your sleep quality on track without any problem of wearing anything on your wrist.
This means that you can just go to your bed and you don’t have to think or worry about wearing an extra tracker, and if you do have a fitness tracker or a smart fitness watch you can charge those gadgets while you sleep with your Withings Sleep.
The Withings Sleep will monitor other stats as well, which include the phases of your sleep, the rate of your heart, the amount of time you are snoring, and your sleep duration.
If you want to jump onto your bed and want to have all of your sleep quality recorded and stats ready for you with an easy-to-use app, this Withing Sleep device is the perfect device for you.
The Withings Sleep is also called Nokia Sleep. The Withings Sleep or Nokia Sleep will not work like the Apple Watch 3 or the Fitbit Charge 2 which is on your wrist.
This is a sleeping pad that can easily slot under a mattress to monitor your sleep without letting you wear an irritating tracker or device around your chest or your wrist.
This Nokia Sleep stays under your bedsheet to track all of your sleep stats and quality and then gives you feedback on everything into the Nokia Health Mate app.
This is a good device as it is not annoying like other devices that are important to wear, this device is like a pad that sits beneath your mattress so you don’t have to worry about wearing any gadget or device at night.
The Withings Sleep or Nokia Sleep instantly knows when you have come on to the bed and it also knows much more about your nights after your sleep, it knows the times of how much your times you have got up for a little walk.
Nokia Sleep is also offering the feature of the time you took to fall asleep, it will also know if you are just sitting on your bed and not lying down.
This device not just monitors your sleep, but it also has many more features that monitor and observe so many details. It will also inform you of the amount of time you take to wake up and get out of bed.
Everything is displayed in its app, and you can see the troubles in your night within a graph which is very easy to read, it will tell you when you have moved into your deep, light,, and REM sleep, it also tells you when you woke up in the night.
Beddit 3.5 Sleep Monitor
Beddit is a non-contact sleep tracker that is perfect for people who like to sleep naked.
This is a device that will monitor your sleep and it sits on top of the mattress, under the sheet. This device is also not a wearing device s you don’t have to wear anything and you can just have good quality sleep.
This is a powerful app that offers you a detailed output and breakdown of your sleep time, your heart, and much more. Beddit Sleep Monitor also tells you if you have been snoring.
This app also offers and tells you about the temperature and humidity in bed, which helps you to optimize the environment of sleep. Almost, all of the information is displayed in an easy-to-read graph, which makes it perfect for examining trends over time.
In 2007, Apple purchased Beddit, and further, they launched the Beddit 3.5, which is the latest and newest model at the time. Beddit 3.5 is not a huge upgrade after Beddit 3 if you already have Beddit 3, there is perhaps no need to buy Beddit 3.5.
The Beddit 3.5 also offers you some suggestions if you have a shorter night of sleep, you will get two different suggestions as a notification pops up the next morning:
- “Try taking a short walk during the day to keep your energy level up”
- “To help you stay focused today, try to get outside a few times for some fresh air”
This device has so much creativity.
The design of the 3.5 version of the Beddit Sleep Monitor is the same as the design of the previous models, which consist of a fabric-covered strip that is fitted with some sensors to help in tracking movement, heart rate, and other factors that may have an impact on your sleep.
You have to make sure that nothing extra is over the sensor as such another blanket or a pillow. There has to be a sheet only between the sensor and your body.
The Beddit 3.5 is quite expensive as its price point is 149 dollars which is twice the price of the Withings Sleep sensor which costs 79 dollars.
These are some of the devices that can have used for sleep tracking so you can see how much good sleep you are taking and if you are not having a good sleep as well.
It will help you improve your sleep and your sleep schedule too. Go through this guide and see which one will be the best for you.
