Gadgetwise Blog: This Clock Is Alarmed by a Lack Of Sleep

Did you get enough sleep last night? Are you sure?

A new device called the Renew SleepClock from Gear4 endeavors to measure your sleep — here’s the twist — without requiring you to wear a monitor. Just perch the clock near the bed and put an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch on the clock’s stand, and it records your sleep patterns.

The sleep-measuring devices are not just for insomniacs, but also for athletes trying to gauge the effectiveness of their after-exercise recovery, or anyone trying to track a connection between sleep and general health.

The Renew SleepClock with an iPad.

Most sleep devices, like the Zeo or the Fitbit, require that a monitor of some sort be worn. The Zeo has a headband that monitors brain waves, and the Fitbit measures motion. (Zeo also offers a free sleep monitoring app called Sleep101. You put your iPhone on the bed to measure tossing and turning.)

The sensor in the Renew measures respiration — by tracking the movement of the sleeper’s chest — as well as tossing and turning, said Victor Marks. senior manager of market development at Gear4. If there is more than one person in the bed, he said, it measures the one closest to the clock (which I didn’t test).

The $200 clock loads its result to the iPhone, iPad or Touch that is attached. When you go to sleep you have to activate the Renew app, then turn it off in the morning when you awake or when the alarm goes off.

You can give the alarm a range of times to wake you, and it will set off the alarm when you are sleeping lightly. If you are heavily asleep the entire time, it will eventually go off anyway.

When you turn off the alarm, the app asks you to assess how you feel, then gives you journal options, allowing you to enter factors that may affect your sleep. Among these are caffeine, exercise or stress.

There is a record showing how long you slept, how much of that sleep was light and how much was heavy, and how often you awoke. After a week’s use, the Renew makes some general suggestions on how to improve your sleep.

The accuracy is iffy. Dr. Lawrence Epstein, chief medical officer for Sleep HealthCenters, a Boston-based chain of sleep labs, said a genuine sleep lab measures at least three parameters: brain waves, muscle tone and eye movement. Products like Renew and Zeo (which he consulted on) “get a good correlation” to what he does in the lab, “but it isn’t 100 percent,” he said.

In a week of using both the Zeo and the Renew, I found the two devices were generally close in the number of hours slept, but often differed on the quality of my sleep. On one day the Renew got readings that were absurdly out of whack, saying I went to bed at 5:13 a.m. (try 11 p.m.-ish) and awoke at noon (uh, no).

But Dr. Epstein said one shouldn’t be too concerned about the accuracy of the detailed information. Just logging overall hours will be enough to improve sleep habits for the majority of users. “Not getting enough sleep is probably the most common problem,” he said, “We know from experience that feeling sleepy isn’t enough to get people to get more sleep.”

Seeing the lack of sleep in black and white, the doctor said, might just provide the needed motivation.