Monitor Your Sleep Cycle To Wake Up Refreshed With MotionX Sleep
MotionX Sleep ($0.99) by MotionX™ is a motion monitor app that senses movement while you sleep, allowing you to analyze your patterns and ultimately improve your overall health. Not only can you use this app to help you sleep, but you can also use it to help you stay active while you are awake.
When first starting the app, users are asked to give a little information about themselves, their height, weight, age and gender. Then, users can input daily walking and sleeping goals and the app will keep track of whether those goals are being met.
To monitor your sleep patterns, either place your iPhone/iPod touch under your pillow or wear the device on your arm with a compatible armband. The app will track your movement, minute-by-minute and show you how long it takes to get to sleep, how often you move and when you wake up.
For example, my sleep pattern for one night showed that it took about a half hour for me to fall asleep. I slept lightly for 15 minutes, deep for about an hour, back to light and so on until I woke.
The app is useful for tracking your daily activity as well. Users can record a walk to see how many steps they have taken, how many calories were burned and how many miles were covered. These walks can be saved and the cumulative results can be analyzed to see if you are meeting your goals.
Another useful feature of this app is that it will alert you if you have been sitting for too long. Many of us sit at a desk for eight hours, not moving more than our arms or even fingers. MotionX Sleep can be set to remind you to get up and move around after a period of time. Set the alert for between 10 minutes and three hours. When it is time, get up and walk around for a minute or two, just to get the blood flowing.
The app has to be running for the motion sensor to work. It is recommended to keep your device plugged into a charger at night in order to ensure that the battery does not drain. However, I left the app running for five and a half hours and it only used about 25 percent of my iPod touch’s battery. This is not a battery hog by any means.
As a way to get you to reevaluate your daily routine and help you get more rest and stay more active during the day, this app works wonderfully. It is full of helpful charts to show you when you’re doing good and when you need to do more. It will not do the work for you though. It is fairly complex, although not complicated. Be it sleeping, walking or sitting, to monitor your activities properly, you’ll need to use this app regularly to see results. For only $0.99, this is one of the better lifestyle apps around. And it works. Now, get out there and go to sleep.
