If I may paraphrase the words of Phil Nickinson (editor of Android Central), the smartphones, we use now for many things in our lives have become the “easiest portal” to our digital self. They’ve gone beyond being just an instrument for making calls, storing information, taking photographs or shooting short videos: nowadays, they are part of our routine up to the last details.
Thanks to legions of smart apps that keep surprising us every day, they can be our assistants in everything – work, nutrition, exercise, social life, health, medical issues, even sleep. There are dozens of smart mobile apps designed to help us get a good night’s rest; let’s take a brief glance at three of the top ones which don’t even need a tracking device to work, they just use the sensors built in the phones.
Sleep Cycle
This innovative app is available for iOS and Android, and it costs 99 cents (while the premium subscription is $9.99 per year). Its main feature is to wake you up at the most convenient time of your sleep cycle, within 30 minutes of the alarm time you’ve set. But the resourceful app does much more than that: it records how much time you spend in bed, and it interprets the quality of your repose by identifying the irregularities that may occur when you sleep, and it highlights them in the graphics it presents. By using the phone’s keen accelerometer, it monitors your movements during night time, thus learning your slumber habits.
MotionX-24/7
The main feature of this 99 cents app is to monitor body motion during sleep. This way, it can show you relevant data about the quality of your sleep. Plus, it comes with a pedometer and a heart-rate monitor, helping you to keep track of your physical activities as well. Besides waking you up at the best moment, the app also plays music for you to relax; the auto-fade out function kicks in when you’re asleep. It tracks your body weight and records audio clips with the noises you make while sleeping. If the graphics tell you there’s a severe problem with your sleep because you keep moving and snoring during the night, you should consider making a few changes in your sleeping habits, starting with investing in a new mattress. Check out the best mattress lists to find out which would be perfect for a healthy sleep.
Sleep As Android
This highly popular app for Android comes at $3.19, the unlocked version. It relies on the phone accelerometer to track your muscle movement; this way, it knows when you’re awake or asleep. The app records the sounds you make while sleeping (even what you mumble) and can play lullabies for you. One of its best features is warning you if you’re in danger of heading to a sleep deficit, based on the graphics it makes for each night. A big help you can get from this app is diagnosing sleep apnea you didn’t know you had. You can also share the recorded data on Facebook and Twitter and the app stores everything in a SleepCloud online storage platform. The application comes with a free trial period of two weeks; most users say they are quite satisfied with the way it works and the results.
