Can’t get enough sleep despite your best efforts to unwind before bed? You’re not alone. In fact, 6 out of every 10 American adults admit to not getting enough sleep, and 4 out of those 10 are struggling to fall asleep, according to the National Sleep Foundation. It’s so bad that it’s becoming an epidemic.
While you could feel fine with a few days of irregular sleep, you might be unintentionally harming yourself in the long term. Scientists all over the world are almost unanimously in agreement that sleep is crucial for your health. Underestimating that could lead to serious consequences in both physiological and psychological aspects of your life.
It’s a significant problem that major technology companies are taking notice of. Many companies release wearable technologies and apps that claim to help with sleep patterns.
So, keep on reading, because the next section will explain in detail how technology can help improve your sleep.
To understand how wearable technologies can help with your sleep health, you must first understand two important facts about sleep for your health.
Number one is to sleep adequately: Sleeping too much is just as much of a problem as sleeping too little. A general healthy sleep window is approximately 7-9 hours a day; more than that can cause an inverse effect on your health.
A national cohort study of adults in China found that short sleep duration (>6 hours) over time is associated with a 17% increased risk of cognitive decline, while sleeping more than 8 hours is associated with an even higher risk, at 57%.
Number two is consistent sleeping, also known as sleep regularity. Regular sleep is just as important as simply getting enough sleep. A longitudinal study involving over 500,000 participants from the UK found that going to sleep and waking up at roughly the same time can lower the risk of all-cause mortality by 20-48%.
Sleeping adequately and consistently are two sides of the same coin; both are essential for maintaining your sleep health. Wearable technologies can help improve your sleep health by tracking your sleep patterns.
You can track your sleep in two ways: self-tracking your sleep and wake times, or using wearable technology to summarize them for you. Despite its benefits and ease, according to the 2025 ResMed global sleep report, nearly 45% of people never track their sleep, and even more puzzling, 22% have resigned themselves to living with sleep deprivation.
Wearable sleep trackers are sensor-equipped devices that aim to improve sleep by collecting data on users’ behavior. These sleep trackers can be in the form of headbands, rings, and wrist-worn smartwatches. The tools are equipped with a special accelerometer.
Simply, the accelerometer detects your pulse when you’re awake and classifies that as waking, while when your pulse is slower (normal during sleeping), it classifies your activity as sleeping. Then provides you with a summary of your sleep-wake patterns.
This method of combining detection and sleep summaries, often referred to as actigraphy, enables wearables to classify how users move between sleep-wake stages at 30-second to 1-minute intervals. These moves between stages are often scientifically referred to as sleep epochs.
Using actigraphy, scientists found that wearable technology is nearly as effective as polysomnography (a more complex test used to diagnose sleep disorders) for detecting sleep patterns. A study comparing six wearable devices with polysomnography in 53 healthy adults found more than 90% of sleep epochs were comparable, indicating nearly identical accuracy.
By using an accelerometer, wearable technology can infer sleep from inactivity and provide a summary. Some wearable devices are often equipped with infrared sensors that infer heart rate variability, pulse oximetry, and even breathing rate.
A systematic review of twenty randomized controlled trials involving 1608 participants from 9 countries finds that the use of wearable devices contributes a small but significant improvement in breathing-related sleep outcomes. The experimental group experiences improvement in this area:
Poor breathing during sleep is largely unintentional, but can increase the risk of mortality. More recent wearable technology can record and provide insights into your sleep cycles and compare them with normal sleep cycles.
This could help you identify disruptions in your sleep cycles. Information and insights can help provide context on where you can improve your sleep.
Only around 35% of Americans have used wearable sleep trackers in 2023.
Clinical studies have found that wrist-worn wearables (e.g., smartwatches) lead to a meaningful reduction in sleep disturbance by 1.69 points among 32 healthy participants within 7 days of use. This highlights that while it’s not an instant fix, wearable technology could help individuals improve their sleep habits.
The next few sections will explain in more detail how wearable tech can benefit your sleep health and why you should consider it.
The key to initiating change is knowing where to start. Wearable technology could help you gather knowledge about sleep problems. Face it, it’s impossible to change your sleep pattern overnight – but knowing where to start is the first realistic step.
A 2025 study involving 1,200 Canadian adults finds that only 19,3% have ever used a sleep tracker device. However, among those who use it, nearly 45% report a positive effect on their sleep, and 43,6% report a positive effect on their stress levels.
This number may seem low. It’s because wearable tech is not an instant fix — you still need to make a change within yourself.
Wearable tech’s function is to track. Another feature that is often integrated into wearable tech sleep trackers is a feedback loop system. This enables your tech to provide feedback based on scientific findings about where you can improve and what could be disturbing your sleep.
Receiving feedback has been proven to help even insomniacs improve their sleep. This research highlights that while daily insights from wearable tech provide a functional baseline, the results depend on how you use them.
Do you have games on your phone? Have you noticed that sometimes there is a daily quest that you can complete to get in-game rewards? This is a concept called gamification.
When you complete your task, you receive a point; if you don’t complete it, you receive demerits. Gamification encourages behavioral change through small rewards and discourages negative behavior through negative feedback.
It’s a highly effective way to break your sleep targets into attainable goals and make them fun. A 40-day-long study with 132 participants tested whether a chatbot that gives points can help build a water-drinking habit compared with an inactive points chatbot. Users with an active points chatbot display water-drinking habits 3 times better than the group without a points chatbot.
Based on this research, gamification can help motivate individuals to change while still making it fun. The points acted as rewards for every change that you can make, even the small ones.
From the previous section, you learned that the gamification method can be useful in encouraging users to maintain good habits. Wearable tech also implemented a few in-product services to help you track and reward your progress. And no change is too small or too late.
Similar to the water-drinking study, a 2024 study of 1062 patients with a very high risk of cardiovascular events had an average age of 67 years old. After 12 months, participants who received both gamification and financial incentives walked 868 more daily steps, while participants who received gamification walked 538 more daily steps.
An incentive program, such as gamification, can be a strong motivator for individuals to start making a change. And more often than not, gamification modes are also implemented with ranking or community systems in which individuals share their progress.
Many people underestimate the power of support from a community that shares a common goal. Even support from strangers who share similar goals can help an individual feel supported in their journey.
A study including nearly 12,000 subscribers from a notable wrist-worn tech wearables company. Over 12 weeks, all user data were tracked, and the study found that users who wore the tech every day slept 0.334 hours longer and had higher sleep consistency than those who wore it fewer than 5 days a week.
Sleep improvement is explained by increased activity levels; the study also finds that frequent users had an average 1,214 ms higher heart rate variability. Therefore, the differences in sleep duration during the research period can be attributed to users becoming more active while using the product, therefore becoming more consistent in their sleeping goals.
Having a community to share with and competing to reach your goals can help you maintain a healthy habit without feeling alone on your journey.
In theory and scientific research, wearable tech helps maintain healthy habits by providing data-driven, personalized insights based on users’ daily patterns. But daily insights can only get you so far; it’s still important that you take charge and turn those insights into real change.
Here are some tips:
Depends on how you can utilize various features on your wearable tech — you can set a realistic set of goals that you can handle. Usually, wearables are equipped with features that account for your target duration. Therefore, you can try this for the first few days to get to know your sleep pattern:
Setting a goal can help you track your progress, without pressuring yourself for an instant noticeable change. Remember, real change is not instant; it’s a constant work in progress. In the case of sleep problems, prioritize consistent sleep hours first. Regular sleep hours can reduce all-cause mortality risk up to 48%.
Read more: From Zzz to Zen: Crafting a Balanced Life Through Better Sleep Habits
Because change is not an instant fix, it’s highly beneficial for you to make it fun. Gamification works because it reduces your cognitive load and builds a small and enjoyable routine for you to start. The main goals of gamification are to keep you consistent with your goals.
One of the things you can do: Activate the scoreboard and join the community.
A gamification feature often has “Scoreboards” or “Leaderboards” — a feature that summarizes your results and compares them with others by using a ranking system. This can boost your little “competitive spirit” to keep going. Research shows that the ranking system is highly effective for beginners.
Research among 516 young adult wearable tech users finds that leaderboard activation leads to a 3,5% increase in daily steps. But for previously sedentary users, leaderboard activation resulted in a 15% increase in daily steps.
Similarly, for your sleep goals, starting small can be intimidating. But every goal and achievement is a ‘win’ for you.
Wearable tech also provides daily activity data, and yes — that’s including your screen time, caffeine intake, stress level, and exercise levels. All of which can disturb your sleep at night.
For example, a wearable tech company tracks its members’ caffeine consumption using heart rate and other member data and finds that caffeine consumption reduces members’ total sleep by 49 minutes on the same night. This is one of the personalized insights a wearable tech can offer you. Allowing you to see any invisible damage from your daytime choices that is secretly hindering your sleep goals.
With these personalized insights, you can start by building a new habit that supports your sleep health journey. Here are a few ways you can do so:
Read more: How to Optimize Indoor Air Quality at Home
Unmanaged and irregular sleep habits are a silent killer. Not only to your health, but also to your mental health, leading to irreversible damage such as a higher risk of mortality and faster cognitive decline. Managing your sleep and maintaining a consistent sleep schedule can seem easy, but it’s harder to sustain because of many small, unnoticed factors you may miss throughout the day.
Wearable devices are a technological advancement that allow you to track subtle, unnoticed details about your health, including your sleep. This technology device tracks and summarizes your sleep progress while making it fun.
While it’s not an instant fix, wearable technology can help you reach your sleep goals with many benefits that make your journey more fun and less lonely.
If you want to see more resources on rest, check out the Wellbeing Science Labs. The lab uses the research of the Institute for Life Management Science to produce courses, certifications, podcasts, videos, and other tools. Visit the Wellbeing Science Labs today.
Photo by rawpixel.com on Freepik
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