New wrist-worn gadget to track your sleep habits: Study

Berlin: A new wrist-worn gadget may help people with sleep problems by objectively tracking their real-life sleep habits and quality, scientists say.

The gadget, called actimeter, records data on wrist movement from which one can obtain activity patterns for up to three months. The researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) in Germany used the actimeters to assess rest/activity cycles not just over the course of the waking day, but also during sleep itself.

The findings are the latest in a larger, ongoing human sleep project, designed to learn more about sleep and its essential role in our lives by collecting sleep data on thousands of people in the real world.

"This will help many who have sleep problems and will hopefully increase the appreciation for the importance of sleep for our health and well-being," Till Roenneberg from LMU Munich said. The team of researchers had been collecting information on sleep duration and quality via questionnaire. The next step was to find a way to collect objective measurements of sleep characteristics on similarly large numbers of people.