App Pick: Beautyrest Sleeptracker
On iOS Today 379, Leo Laporte showed off the Beautyrest Sleeptracker. This comes from Silicon Valley legend Philippe Kahn, the man who created Turbo Pascal, invented the first camera phone, and developed motion tracking that we see in smartphones and wearable technology today. His current company is Fullpower, and he's applied his sophisticated sensor technology to sleep tracking. The result is a product from Beautyrest simply called Sleeptracker, and it can produce a wide range of statistics without having to wear anything to bed.
The Beautyrest Sleeptracker comes with two sensors that are placed underneath your mattress — one sensor goes on the side where your pillow is, and the other goes on your partner's side. This means it can accurately track two sleepers in the same bed. It works automatically, so there's no need to manually start or end the sleep session. It can detect motion along with respiratory rate and heart rate, allowing it to monitor the various stages of sleep including light sleep, deep sleep, and REM cycles. The Sleeptracker app on iOS or Android has an alarm system that will wake you up at the optimal time. Then you can use the app to look at the data collected, or you can ask Alexa on your Amazon Echo for a report on how you slept. Sleeptracker will give you nightly sleep scores based on all of the data as well, and it will give you tips for how to get better sleep.