The slew of sleep gadgets on the market all promise to provide insights into slumber. Yet because many of them include a wearable component to measure sleep quality, there's the inevitable question of how these monitors aversely affect their readings. After all, how comfortable can you be wearing a headband or, perhaps to a lesser degree, a wristband for eight hours each night?
Then there's the next question. With so many moving parts, how likely is it that consumers will use sleep trackers for the long term? As much as I liked the sleep analytics provided by Zeo, after spending a few weeks with its trackers, I lost interest. In short, they took too much effort.
READ MORE: Battle of the Zzzs: How Zeo's Sleep Monitors Stack Up
Enter Gear4's Renew SleepClock, an iPhone dock that, when combined with a free app, will monitor your sleep from the bedside. Unlike the Zeo which will provide an in-depth look at your brain waves during various sleep states, Gear4 uses actigraphy to track motion (commonly used in sleep clinics and other consumer sleep trackers, such as Lark) and a low-amplitude monitor to track breathing patterns.
When it's bedtime, all you have to do is push the sleep/snooze button — no need to have the app running in the foreground. When it's time to wake up, the app will gently nudge you at an increasing volume during an optimal time relative to your sleep cycle within a pre-set window. To keep tabs on the quality of sleep, it tracks how you feel upon waking and factors (anything from coffee consumption to noise) that might be responsible for a poor night's sleep.
While the Renew SleepClock has convenience going for it — it's easy enough to use every night with minimal effort — it sorely lacks a Web dashboard for users to analyze their information outside an iOS mobile device. The only available option to get this data out of the app is to export a CSV file. While that's readable, it isn't the most user friendly to look at. Instead of a chart, the spreadsheet shows a massive string of letters. These are abbreviations (W for wake, S for light sleep, D for sleep sleep and A for away) for 30-second increments throughout the night. But without a graphical representation, it's difficult to make anything of them. I've been told the company is looking to build a separate Web dashboard. Renew SleepClock, which launched in June and is sold at Apple Stores, is still undergoing a number of developments, and it also hopes to incorporate other features in the near future, including recommendations from sleep experts, a white noise generator and the ability to set sleep targets.
At $199.99, Gear4 is trying to sell more than just a sleep tracker. For half the price, you could buy a Zeo or Lark monitor. But with iPhone docks as its bread and butter, Gear4 isn't straying from its roots, providing a crisp speaker (good for casual listening, not so much blasting party tunes) with an unobtrusive sleep monitor. At about 40 square inches, I think its footprint is far too large. Not to mention, I wonder who's in the market for an iPhone dock, which seems almost antiquated in the age of portable Bluetooth speakers, some of which can also charge mobile devices. But for those who crave a fluid sleep tracking experience they can use every night and don't mind that coming in the form of an iPhone dock, this could be the bedside gadget for them.
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