Other sleep trackers we’ve tested
Photography: Simon Hill
Second-generation Google Nest Hub for $90: The second generation Nest Center It uses radar to track your sleep, meaning you don’t need to wear anything, but it also has a microphone to track snoring, sleep talking, and other night sounds. I love the Nest Hub on my nightstand for smart home controls, family photos, and listening to sleep sounds or podcasts in bed, but sleep tracking consistently overestimated my REM phases and I missed periods of wakefulness that other trackers recorded. When I used multiple trackers simultaneously, the Nest Hub was the outlier.
Sleep routine: tracker and alarm for $7 a month or $60 a year (iOS/Android): You don’t necessarily need a new device, because there are several sleep tracking apps. I tried Sleep Routine on my iPhone 14 Pro. The app provides a report for each night, dividing your sleep into awake, light, deep, and REM. The results seemed accurate and broadly agreed with those of the Ultrahuman Ring Air. You can add notes to help you better understand your sleep, creates a sleep pattern analysis and shows your statistics over time. Smart alarm function wakes you up gently. You can try Sleep Routine for a week before having to subscribe. The problem? The app can be a little unstable. A couple of times in a week, I received an error message in the morning with no report or a very short sleep recorded. The annoying thing is that there was no indication why it failed.
Withings ScanWatch 2 for $350: Wear the Withings ScanWatch 2 (7/10, WIRED recommended) in bed and you’ll get a sleep score of 100 in the morning. It covers the same four stages as other trackers (awake, REM, light, and deep), but features a PPG sensor to measure breathing rate. You can also track your heart rate, temperature, and blood oxygen levels. ScanWatch 2 provides a wealth of data and advice in the Withings app. But some people may find it bulky and uncomfortable to sleep on, and had trouble distinguishing between light sleep and when awake in bed.
Muse S Gen 2 Headband for $400: This headband has sensors capable of tracking your brain activity, similar to an electroencephalogram (EEG), along with an accelerometer and gyroscope, and a PPG sensor to measure heart rate and blood circulation. It’s primarily a meditation aid designed to help you relax, but it can also track your sleep, recording your heart rate, breathing, time to fall asleep, and how much you moved to give you an overall sleep score. Unfortunately, I found it uncomfortable to wear and would often wake up to find that sleep tracking had failed, usually because I had taken it off at night. It is also too expensive.
Philips Sleep Headphones with Kokoon for $270: While pairing headphones with sleep tracking is a smart idea, using these headphones made it harder for me to fall asleep. The small earbuds connect to a curved control unit designed to sit on the back of your head and are relatively comfortable as the entire thing is covered in flexible silicone. The companion app plays meditations, relaxing sounds, and sleep stories to help you stop or drown out your snoring partner. You can also connect via Bluetooth to play your own content. The sleep tracking is limited and shows the familiar four phases, sleep efficiency and consistency, but I often woke up to find that they had turned off during the night and shortened my sleep tracking.
Biostrap Kairós for $900: This lightweight wrist-worn bracelet has a PPG sensor and accelerometer to track your heart rate, breathing, and HRV. It tracks sleep divided into awake, light, and deep sleep (REM added soon) and combines your biometric data to give you a sleep score. It also surveys you every morning about the quality of your sleep and how refreshed you feel, and asks how you felt when you woke up and before you went to sleep. It seems pretty accurate, but it’s designed for researchers, medical staff, and organizations looking to monitor employee health or study the impact of new services or products, so it’s not available for most people to purchase.