Sleep trackers are wrong half the time, warns expert
Sleep-monitoring devices, which often take the form of electronic wristbands, claim to monitor sleep patterns and provide insights into sleep quality and duration.
They have grown in popularity, but Merijn van de Laar, a psychologist and sleep therapist, has raised concerns about the technology.
Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival, partnered with The Telegraph, he said: 'The thing about the commercially available sleep trackers is that they're not reliable.
'They are actually only capable of measuring whether you're awake or asleep 50 per cent of the time. So half of the time they're wrong.
'I saw a lot of people that were reading a book very quietly and the things (trackers) thought they were sleeping.
'We know that for people who have sleeplessness, the trackers actually perform even worse. So it's best not to use a tracker.'
The UK industry for sleep trackers was estimated at £270 million in 2023 and is forecast to more than double by 2030.
Trackers often use sensors to track movement, heart rate, and breathing patterns, and will produce a score in the morning about how well a person has slept.
Mr van de Laar, who was speaking about his new book How to Sleep Like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night's Rest, said trackers provided some value as they can 'make some kind of estimate of how long you've slept'.
However, he said 'the rest is all b----cks'.
Mr van de Laar, who has treated between six and seven thousand people with chronic insomnia, also claimed that using a phone before bed was not as harmful as believed.
'There was a big review in 2024 that found the use of mobile phones did not have the effect that we might expect,' he said.
'Sometimes people might take two to three minutes more to fall asleep, but in most cases, it's a negligible effect.
'A lot of people thought that it was very logical, if you have the blue light and if you're stimulating yourself, then you have more difficulty falling asleep.
'But in practice, we saw that this was not the case.
'And what I saw in practice is that a lot of people that I treated actually used the mobile phone before going to bed and did something like watching a series or something like that.'
Mr van de Laar said that if the light was not too intense, then using a phone had the same effect as watching TV before going to bed.
'A couple of decades ago, people said, don't watch the TV before going to bed, while the same people were falling asleep on the couch while watching the TV,' he added.
'I think we've got off from the black and white stuff that we heard 10 years ago.'
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