How Do Smartwatches Help Improve Your Sleep?

Being active is important to keep yourself healthy and having a good night's sleep is just as important as well. In fact, it’s so important that we spend more than ⅓ of our lives just sleeping. Sleep allows our bodies and minds to recover, and without it, our cognitive and physical abilities diminish.

In a busy modern lifestyle, it’s hard to maintain regular and quality sleep. Since sleep is a very important part of our health and wellness, it comes as no surprise that one of the most basic and important features of a smartwatch or a fitness watch is sleep tracking.

A good smartwatch like the new Samsung Galaxy Watch6 series not only tracks your sleep but also analyses and provides personalised recommendations to help you get back to a healthy sleep routine. But how exactly do these smartwatches do it?

Tracking Sleep

Obviously, when you’re asleep, you’re less likely to be active. That means your heart rate and breathing rate slow down, and you’re probably not moving much—a smartwatch with a sleep tracking feature will be able to track all these using accelerometers and tiny motion detectors.

With the same system, the sleep tracker tracks your sleep quality throughout the night. For instance, if the watch detects frequent or prolonged periods of restlessness or an elevated heart rate during what should be deep sleep, it might indicate disruptions or disturbances in your sleep.

The Galaxy Watch6 series sleep tracking feature is powered by advanced sensors that continuously monitor a range of physiological signals, including heart rate and movement. These sensors feed data into sophisticated algorithms that interpret the information to determine when you're asleep, the quality of your sleep, and any disruptions that might occur.

Consolidating Sleep Data

After collecting your data, your smartwatch or fitness watch consolidates that data and gives you a report on how you slept the night before. Now, not all smartwatches can provide a comprehensive report; most of the time, you’ll just get an overview of your sleep time and sleep stages.

For the more advanced smartwatches, you may be able to get a more detailed report and analysis. The Galaxy Watch6 series, for example, gives you a Sleep Score, complete with an in-depth analysis of the factors. This includes metrics such as total sleep time, sleep cycle duration and awake time, physical and mental recovery. By analyzing these factors, the watch can provide insights into the quality of sleep you're getting each night.

Most smartwatches stop at just generating reports of your sleep quality, but Samsung takes it a step further by providing individualized tips. These tips give users detailed feedback about their sleep health each morning. If the watch detects irregularities or potential issues with your sleep, these messages can offer suggestions or insights to help improve sleep quality.

Tracking Sleep Consistency

Just one night of good sleep isn’t quite enough, actually. Consistency is key to a good night’s sleep, so it’s also vital to keep track of your sleep and wake times.

The Galaxy Watch6 tracks how consistent your sleep and wake times are, providing a Sleep Consistency metric. If this metric shows significant variability, it indicates disruptions in your sleep routine.

After monitoring your sleep pattern for seven days, the program assigns one of eight sleep animal symbols to represent your sleep behaviour. Then, according to your sleep animal, the watch guides you in forming healthy routines to achieve quality sleep. It monitors daily activities, offering advice on managing various aspects, from exercise and nutrition to mindfulness and health monitoring.

Enhanced Sleep Coaching

However, merely tracking sleep isn't sufficient. Establishing good sleeping habits is equally crucial. Most of the smartwatches will do just like that, leaving you to find out which sleep pattern works best for you by trial and error, but some of the more advanced sleep trackers, like the Galaxy Watch6 series, provide advanced sleep coaching as well to help with keeping up good sleep habits.

This feature provides tailored instructions, tips, and reminders to help users put their sleep insights into action. Samsung's Sleep Coaching Programme is designed to facilitate everyone’s unique sleep patterns and provide insights to better your sleep routine daily.

Crafting a Sleep-Conducive Environment

The environment in which we sleep plays a pivotal role in the quality of our rest. Factors like screen brightness or room temperature can significantly influence our sleep.

To minimize distractions from mobile devices, the Galaxy Watch6 allows users to sync Sleep Mode between their Galaxy smartphone and watch. This mode mutes notifications, changes the phone background to grayscale, deactivates the Always On Display, ensures the Galaxy Watch6 remains inactive during sleep and LED sensor will be changed to an infrared sensor so that it will not distract your sleep

The Galaxy Watch6 series exemplifies the potential of wearable technology to promote better health and wellness. By leveraging advanced sensors, algorithms, and integrative features, these smartwatches provide invaluable insights into our sleep patterns and disruptions. As we continue to understand the importance of sleep in overall health, tools like the Galaxy Watch6 become essential companions in our journey towards better rest and rejuvenation.

Purchase: Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Series

Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch6 series brings back one of the most-missed features in their smartwatches: the physical rotating bezel! You can now navigate through the menus on the Galaxy Watch6 Classic with ease and style, while still enjoying all the health and fitness tracking features you can want, including blood pressure monitoring and ECG!

The Galaxy Watch6 Series is available for purchase starting now. It will retail at a starting price of RM1,099 for the Galaxy Watch6 and RM1,399 for the Galaxy Watch6 Classic.