Your Sleep Tracker Could Be Off by Up to 89 Minutes, Sleep.ai Says

Ever compared sleep scores with a friend and wondered whose watch is lying?

You both went to bed at 11 and woke up at 7. One ring says you got seven hours, the other watch swears it was closer to six. Turns out the gap might not be you.

What actually happened

Sleep.ai, a Carlsbad, California company formerly known for its consumer SleepScore Labs app, announced $5.3 million in new funding on Nov. 11, led by Treasure Coast Ventures with the Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater NY. The company says it has now analyzed more than 1.1 billion hours of real world sleep data.

The headline number comes from that data. Sleep.ai says that when measuring identical sleep, wearable platforms show typical gaps of 57 to 89 minutes, depending on the brand. It didn’t say which brands, and the analysis is its own and hasn’t been independently reviewed. Its pitch is software that smooths out those differences for companies that build sleep scores into their apps.

Sleep.ai’s platform pulls from phone sensors, including sonar that the company says records no audio, plus just under 800 wearables. In Germany it runs Dein Schlaf, an insurer covered sleep program that it says enrolled 25,000 people this year. The company says users who tracked 36 nights slept about half an hour longer per night.

“Sleep is where better health starts,” said Colin Lawlor, Sleep.ai’s founder and CEO.

Our read: your score is a trend line, not a verdict

This is our read. If two good trackers can be more than an hour apart on the same night, the number on your wrist is best used to compare you with you. Same device, same bedtime habits, week over week.

Reality check

The 57 to 89 minute gap is Sleep.ai’s own unreviewed analysis, and the brands weren’t named, so you can’t tell how your device stacks up. New funding shows investors are interested, not that the product works. The Dein Schlaf results are company numbers too.

The close

Next time your friend brags about a better sleep score, you have a comeback. Their tracker might just be counting differently.

Sources

Disclosure: WellWham has no affiliate links in this story.