Medical research suggests that naps increase memory retention when studying for exams, improve human performance, remove waste metabolites from the brain, and shorten healing times. Yet, daytime naps can also impair night-time sleep and lead to insomnia.
Both cannot be true which suggests there could be a “moderate” balance.
Are there any sleep devices that actually track naps accurately and automatically?
The Beddit, Fitbit, and Hello all say that naps are not yet supported or have to be entered manually. When tested for naps, they also consistently fail. This is non-ideal.
Has anyone encountered any ambient tracking device that can track naps? (Even if it can just track that you are in the bed - rather than sleeping in it.)
I just asked Steven Jonas if he tracked his naps in Supermemo. The answer was no, and Supermemo has no automatic tracking, but if you manually enter data you can correlate with learning.
Emfit tracks “bed presence” on a timeline, but all the sleep stats are calculated over 24h periods of time. Also, like Beddit, it only works if you are napping in your bed…
ooh, I’m also interested i this - not because naps, but because I’ll shortly be dealing with the kind of broken sleep you get with a newborn (ie multiple short sleeps throughout the 24hr period).
I have several sleep-tracking apps and mostly they only consider one block of sleep to be what people do, but new parents generally go polyphasic out of necessity.
If anybody has a solution to this I’d be really happy.
The old but still occasionally available Zeo’s track naps just as well as regular sleep; one can have multiple sleep sessions in one day and they are kept separate. However their proprietary “ZQ” score is not calibrated for naps, so you will get a meaningless low ZQ score for a nap even though that nap might have been quite refreshing and healthful.
But the Zeo is not of course really an “ambient tracking device” since you have to put it on and off your head for a sleep session.
I’m especially interested in ones that are not location or bed-based. Meaning - I tend to nap most often on the bus/train or other places outside of my bed. So a bed-based tracker wouldn’t do the job for me.
I’ve recently started using Pillow on the Apple Watch. You have to start and end the nap manually from the watch, however I prefer to have that control, rather than have a device that thinks I’m napping, when I’m actually watching a movie. The nice thing is that it will track whether it thought you fell asleep during the nap.
I have started using a pillow from two months. I really like is discovering my sleep qualities. I am working on doing meditation before some time of sleeping.
Interesting goals! Here’s my take on nap tracking.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch does a fantastic job at automatically tracking sleep and naps and (automatically) distinguishing between them so you can view them separately. In general, the automatic/passive sleep tracking is very accurate at detecting when you fall asleep and when you wake up, as well as points you (even briefly) wake up during the night, but not very accurate about the sleep stages of ‘light’, ‘REM’, ‘Deep’.
Here’s an example of a day I slept for 5:55, then took a 2:39 nap:
You can click on either sleep block to highlight it and get details, but I can only post 3 pictures per post so I cut one of these.
Unfortunately, I had to stop using Pillow. The Watch app had an issue where the “end nap” button was unresponsive leading to naps that lasted for multiple days. I switch to Heartwatch which only gives me duration. Though that is the main thing that I’m interested in.
