HealthPulse 360

You wake up. You check your watch. It says your sleep score was 62. Suddenly you feel worse than you did two minutes ago. Sound familiar? Sleep trackers have become one of the most popular wellness gadgets in the world, and researchers have a real name for what they can sometimes do to us. Let's look at how accurate they actually are, and where they help versus hurt. What Sleep Trackers Actually Measure Here's the first thing most people don't realize: these devices don't directly measure sleep. Experts emphasize that devices like the Apple Watch, Fitbit, and Oura Ring estimate sleep from indirect signals, mainly heart rate and body movement, rather than reading actual brain activity. The true gold standard for measuring sleep is called polysomnography, a clinical test done in a sleep lab that reads real brain waves, eye movement, and muscle activity. Consumer trackers use algorithms to guess what polysomnography would have shown, based on patterns in the signals ...