Sleep Tracker Will Help You Track Your Zzzz's
Sleep Tracker ($0.99) by Cameron Johnson is a specialized clock app that tracks sleep trends over time. It allows manual or automatic sleep timing and analyzes trends in sleeping patterns.
Comprising nearly a third of the time we spend on this earth, sleep gets surprisingly little attention. It happens (nearly) every day and there is perhaps nothing that has a greater impact on our mood when we face the world.
The iPhone has become quite the tool at assisting us in getting and improving our sleep. Sleep Tracker is one of the latest apps geared towards tackling insomnia and it does so by helping you set and track specific goals. Each night you can start the timer when you lay down with your teddy bear and then stop it first thing in the morning while you rub the gunk out of your eyes.
These nights of sleep are stored and, over time, trends are shown such as: average bed time, wake time and sleep time, consistency, maximums and minimums. Graphs are also provided so that you can see if you are trending upwards, downwards or not at all with regard to your sleep.
Goals are an integral part of Sleep Tracker. In the settings you set what your ideal (and realistic) sleep goal is. As you start to aggregate data, you will get a letter grade on how well you are doing with your goal.
Sleep Tracker succeeds with the little things. It supports multitasking so you can set the alarm and then still check your email while you are in bed. It also supports landscape which is nice for graph viewing.
Perhaps my favorite feature is the manual sleep time entry. I religiously use Smart Alarm for helping me wake up at the easiest time (it works I tell you, it works!), but it's sorely lacking on data analysis with basic features such as average sleep time missing. Because of the manual entry, I can use both of these apps hand in hand to get a better grasp on my slumber numbers.
Not everyone will be interested in the standard deviation of their sleep like I am, but I think many would be intrigued to see some basic statistics on their sleep.
Sleep Tracker is a great way of breaking down your sleep patterns. It is functional, solid and just interesting enough to attract some fans of other, more mainstream sleeping apps. Insomniacs, stat nerds and those curious about boosting their slumber should give sleep tracker a look.
