Sleep Health APP

Currently, the effectiveness of mainstream sleep health APPs in improving people with mild to moderate sleep problems is between 42% and 68%. It is neither a "magic drug" that can cure insomnia, nor is it a completely useless "IQ tax". The core value is to help users quantify vague sleep feelings and complete the decision-making basis for independent sleep adjustment. However, the ceiling of the effect is limited by the user's willingness to implement and the algorithm expertise of the APP itself.

I have tested more than 20 sleep-related apps on the market. The first time I helped my Internet operator find a solution - that guy stayed up until 2 o'clock every day before lying in bed and tossing and turning for more than an hour before falling asleep. He always said that he was "naturally sleepless". It was not until I wore the bracelet for a week that I saw that my deep sleep ratio was not even 10%, and I woke up five times in one night without consciousness. Later, he followed the advice given by the APP and changed the blackout curtains in his bedroom to completely black ones. He stopped drinking coffee after 3 p.m. and fell asleep 40 minutes earlier. Now everyone he meets says that the APP saved his life.

What’s interesting is that the academic community’s controversy over this type of APP has never stopped. Evidence-based medicine researchers who hold a negative attitude believe that the monitoring errors of most civilian sleep APPs are too high and cannot be used as a basis for decision-making: if only relying on mobile phone microphones and acceleration sensors to measure turning and breathing, the data error can reach up to 30%. I have stepped into this pit myself. I lay in bed and read professional books for half an hour. A certain popular APP directly counted me as 28 minutes of light sleep. In the end, it gave me a high score of 82, which made me laugh and cry. When I attended an industry salon last year, an engineer working on sleep algorithms from a major manufacturer also bluntly said: "Civilian-grade products are meant for reference. If I really suspect that I have problems like sleep apnea, I will go directly to the hospital for polysomnography. This thing of ours is not a medical device in the first place." ”

But from the perspective of behavioral interventionists, even if the data is not that accurate, as long as it can help users establish healthy sleep habits, this thing is worthwhile. The little girl upstairs in my house who was preparing for the postgraduate entrance examination used to be able to get a little more while lying on the bed and scrolling through postgraduate entrance examination experience posts. The more she scrolled, the more anxious she became and the more she couldn't sleep. Then she used the sleep lock function of a certain APP. At that point, her phone was locked and she could only answer calls. She fell asleep just lying down and felt bored. She advanced her sleep time by more than 40 minutes in half a month. Do you think this effect is attributed to the APP or to her? In fact, no matter what, the APP just gave her an external force to help her break the conditioned reflex of "checking her phone as soon as she goes to bed".

The sleep APPs on the market now actually take two completely different paths. One is for monitoring that is bound to hardware. If used with a smart watch or sleep monitoring band, the data accuracy can be increased to more than 85%. It is suitable for people who have obvious sleep problems and need to track data for a long time to adjust their work and rest.； The other category focuses on intervention functions. It is full of functions such as white noise, meditation before bed, and clocking in and out of work and rest. It is suitable for young people who just have a chaotic work and rest and want to reset their biological clock.

Of course, there are a lot of shortcomings. The most outrageous one I have ever seen was when I opened three apps to test them at the same time on the same night. The final sleep scores given to me were 62, 78, and 89 respectively, which was a huge difference. There are also many people who complain that using apps makes them more anxious. They are annoyed when they are lying in bed and cannot fall asleep. When they think about the apps timing and calculating scores next to them, they become more anxious and unable to sleep. Instead, they stay up until the second half of the night. In the past two years, the industry has also been adjusting. Many new apps have canceled the real-time sleep progress display and will only generate reports after waking up, for fear of aggravating users' "monitoring anxiety."

I have been using the sleep APP on and off for almost three years. To be honest, the most useful thing is not the daily sleep score at all. It was the comparison of the reports I made for half a year last year. I found that as long as I drank more than one cup of milk tea that day, whether it was at 3 pm or 8 pm, the duration of deep sleep that day was bound to be less than 1 hour. Later, I quit the habit of drinking milk tea after 2 pm, and the problem of waking up at 2 am that had troubled me for a long time disappeared.

To put it bluntly, this thing is the same as the fitness APP on your mobile phone. It will definitely be useful if you follow it every day. If you never click on it after installing it, it is no different from not having it installed. Don’t expect it to solve your stress-related insomnia caused by owing a mortgage, not completing KPIs, and having to meet with clients the next day. Don’t beat it to death and say it’s all a lie. If you really want to try it, don’t just buy a membership for several years. Use the free version to test it for a week first, and then renew if you can adjust your schedule accordingly. Otherwise, it’s a complete waste of money.

By the way, if you have been lying in bed for more than half a month and can't sleep for two or three hours, and you are so groggy during the day that it affects your work, don't rely on the APP. Go directly to the hospital's sleep department to register. It's better than anything else.