Well, I've been using the sleep cycle app for 7 nights now and have mixed feelings. It is a fascinating experiment and that alone is worth it for me. The graph of the nights sleep reveals a lot. Example: The first night my sleep looked rather like the sample of an average night. The next day I had a stressful situation come up, not bad but one of those that sets up brain spin. That second night my sleep graph looked really different and it gradually came back to normal by the fourth night.
As far as I can tell its main purpose, to wake you at the least intrusive time works well. I only did that three days as I normally sleep till I wake anyway. If I were back on someone elses clock I think it would be terrific.
It also has built in heart rate monitoring in that when you turn it off in the morning you are prompted to check the rate via the camera (and it works!). It gives me a record of my waking HR, if only.....See below
The problem for me is in the compilation of the data. It uses 5 nights sleep before it gives a "sleep quality" rating. Hmm, 83% of
what? Out of 100? As compared to the night before? My best night so far? Some aritrary scale? It tells me how many hours I was in bed, or more accurately, had the app on. That's good, but any clock tells me that. I would like to be able to set a rolling avg e.g last three nights or last two weeks etc. Same with the HR, one day, and I can scroll back to see each day at a time, but cannot set for any analysis. This would be easy to set up in the back end with a couple of formulas and I think it would add a lot of value. Which leads me to.........Another app!
I think we are getting close to something that will auto aggregate all of these things we track (if you're into it) and in fact quite a few do play well together but then it's back to who has your data? We can export CSV data to a closed excel sheet but that gets a bit messy for most folks. Another app called
Loggr looks very promising, I am just starting to tinker with it. If you're into tracking anything at all you can put it here, of course you have to do the putting which will stop a lot of people. But once there it looks like it will be a nice little shortcut to have for making all this info actually useful, or at least more playful. Btw, this is for
any data, not just for exercise. Make it up as you go along or use templates. This little guy will also let you export any of it to your personal sheets via CSV if you want to for extended fun of the very geeky variety. I may be in love.
Oh yeah, I walked on the beach and did PT.
