I'm Dr. Joshua Schwimmer, a nephrologist and internal medicine physician in New York City. • Kidney Notes was the first active nephrology blog. (Trivia: Kidney Notes is so old that the National Library of Medicine still uses it as an example of how to formally cite blogs.) • Professionally, you can find me at Kidney.nyc. • Kidney Notes is for educational purposes only, not medical advice. Consult qualified health care professionals. See disclaimer.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Final Sleeptracker Review: No Magic Bullet




Disclaimer: Sleep isn't my specialty. My experience may not be yours.

I've evaluated Sleeptracker for one week, and I can't detect any significant difference in my sleep or wakening. To recap: Sleeptracker is a watch which is designed to detect REM or stage 1 sleep and wake you up at the "optimal" time.

This sounds good in theory, but in order for this to be effective the following must be true:

  1. REM or stage 1 sleep must be sensed,
  2. the stages of sleep must be sensed accurately,
  3. there must be a noticeable benefit to wakening in the lighter stages of sleep.

The problem is this: the Sleeptracker website doesn't say how it works. This is understandable, but it means there is no way to verify that #1 or #2 is true. Number 3 intuitively seems true, but no evidence is cited to back this up.

Personally, I have not noticed that I wake easily or feel unusually refreshed when using Sleeptracker. There could be many reasons for this (and again, my experience may not be yours), but for a product this expensive, I would hope for a more obvious benefit.
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