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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

What do people do with data from their sleep trackers? I tracked my sleep for years with a Fitbit and now I track it with an Oura ring. I look at the results occasionally, but it has never provided any useful information.

Is there something I'm not aware of?

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If it tells you that you've been waking up a lot or that your oxygen level drops precipitously every minute or so, you go see a doctor.

There are people trying to "optimize" their sleep, of course, but the real benefit is getting a large chunk of the population to notice something is wrong.

The same with the ECG. A one lead ECG isn't much, but it means a lot when you give it without any hassle or additional cost to millions of people.

So sleep tracking isn't useful for people unless they have sleep problems? Now that I say it, it sounds kind of obvious.

It's also for people who might develop sleep problems. Or for just generally tracking your sleep schedule to help yourself be in good sleep hygiene.

I use AutoSleep on Apple Watch 4. It is good at poking me after a few days of not sleeping enough with a message like: "You slept for 5:38 last night, and have a sleep debt of 12%". That's enough of a poke to get my sleep back on track.

I've also used it to experiment a bit with how drinking at night affects my sleep. (noticeably!). I could do that with just how I feel, but the hard data is easier to correlate later.

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