Long work hours and more time spent around gadgets has eaten into our sleep hours. And that is an unhealthy trend. That’s why we are now starting to see more and more health and fitness apps focusing on sleep tracking. Runtastic, which is better known for its fitness tracking has just launched its latest app called Sleep Better, which intends to help you get a good night’s sleep by tracking sleep movements over a period of time. We decided to test it out and find out its potential.
Sleep Better with Runtastic Android Review
Sleep Better with Runtastic is free to download and once installed on your device, you can browse through the various options and features available on the phone. The app claims to track your sleep phases and its integrated alarm feature is built to ensure that you wake up when it’s the right time to do so.
The app also claims to help you understand how workouts, caffeine intake, moon phases and other factors influence your sleep. Oh and dreams find a place in the app too! You can take notes about the dreams you had, good ones and bad and how often you have them.
The app works by placing the phone next to your pillow and leaving it charged to the power outlet. I’m not too big on having a charging phone sitting under my head while I’m sleeping after hearing horror stories of phones blowing up but that’s the cost of measuring your sleep with Runtastic. When you start the app it asks you to leave it on a flat surface to calibrate, then you’re ready to set the alarm.
When you wake up Sleep Better will ask you a series of questions about how you’re feeling, if you had dreams, what sort of dreams they were and if you feel particularly chirpy that morning, you can even write down notes about those nightly dreams.
You can find the daily sleep tracks in a Sleep Diary in the menu section. It reveals at a glance how much of sleep time was spent awake, how much light sleep you had and how much time was spent in deep sleep. You’ll also see a net sleep efficiency indicator which shows up as a percentage at the top of the screen.
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The menu also features a Statistics page indicating your sleep efficiency over a period of time. You’ll also be able to see the longest night and shortest night of sleep you had over a week, all perfectly interesting data to go over when you are determined to get your body the rest it deserves.
There are other options that you can add to determine your sleep efficiency such as adding your workouts, food and caffeine consumption and stress levels. Apparently, the influence of the moon in its various phases is also another factor that can cause variations in sleep patterns so there’s a section dedicated to that too. You can access all these features and more only if you unlock the full version of the app, which is quite pricey at just under$5.
Sleep Better with Runtastic somehow doesn’t impress me much. I am not too convinced with the efficacy of its sleep factor considerations and the accuracy of its results when certain factors are ignored. In fact, for this to work, you may have to unlock the full version and input several factors everyday for it to deliver any tangible result. And once you know that you’ve been sleeping erratically, how do you fix this with the available data?
Anyway, Sleep Better with Runtastic is free to download so you can give it a try and tell us if you found its methods convincing enough to follow through.
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