Pillow – Sleep Tracking and Analysis Alarm Clock

Sleep tracking is becoming a bigger thing as more people want to track how they sleep to improve their health, and look at their sleep patterns. Pillow not only allows you to track your sleep easily, it also allows you to record sounds whilst you sleep, calculate your optimal time to wake up and give you an alert, as well as give you advanced analytics and a sleep lab that shows you what you can do to improve your sleep.

I’ve been using Pillow for a while now, and it’s been great. Pillow allows you to track your sleep using your movements with the built in gyroscope in your iPhone. By placing your phone next to your Pillow, it can detect when you move and therefore build up a graph of how you slept during the night. If you use an Apple Watch, the app can also track you heart rate related to your sleep, which aids in improving your sleep patterns, and also shows you what your heart rate was during your sleep.

Pillow gives you advanced heart analytics, including showing your heart rate during certain zones.
Pillow gives you advanced heart analytics, including showing your heart rate during certain zones.

Pillow gives you many different forms of tracking, including allowing you to just switch modes from full mode, with audio recordings, tracking and alarm, to switching off the audio recordings and alarm. You can select the mode by swiping up and accessing the different modes, which also include nap modes that give you full sleep analysis and statistics for each session.

Swiping up opens a small screen where you can swipe left or right to access more modes.
Swiping up opens a small screen where you can swipe left or right to access more modes.

After you’ve selected your mode, you can set your alarm (if the mode you choose allows this). Select the latest time you want the alarm to sound, and it will ring when you are most awake in a 30 minute timeframe. You can change this to a shorter time if you want. You can also use sleep notes, which are small snippets you can select and deselect, such as read, ate late or your own custom ones.

When you wake up from your sleep session, Pillow gives you a full overview of how you’ve slept, and also gives you mood tracking, which you select when you wake up, audio recordings and heart rate analysis. You can swipe between days to see your different days of sleep, and also change tabs between your heart rate, your overall sleep tracking, and audio. It also shows you the amount of times you spent in each sleeping zone, and you can listen to your audio recordings too. Selecting your mode also shows how you felt when you woke up in the morning. The app also calculates your average sleep quality and time, and compares your night’s sleep to all your other nights.

If you hold the phone landscape, you can get more detailed analytics, and Pillow integrates with Apple Health to show you your steps compared to your sleep quality, and other things such as weight and cycling distance compared to sleep quality.

Sleep quality compared to steps.
Sleep quality compared to steps.

All your data is synced across iCloud, so it’s on all your your devices whenever you need it.

Pillow is a great sleep tracking app – it’s accurate, and it shows you how you sleep and how to improve your sleep. If you are looking to track your sleep, I really recommend checking out Pillow. I love that you can look how your steps affect your sleep quality, and the advanced analytics that Pillow offers are really useful.

Pillow is free, with the Pro upgrade at £4.99.

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