John’s Blog

As I blogged a bit ago, I recently picked up a Zeo — it’s a sleep monitor for tracking states of sleep each night. Ive always had trouble sleeping and so have a bit of a fascination with understanding sleep and how it affects me personally.

After about 30 days, I’ve decided to return it, because I have suspicions that the data collection isn’t very accurate. I woke up several times each night — times that I was alert enough to get out of bed, walk to the bathroom and back, and then eventually go back to sleep — but the Zeo didn’t seem to register those periods of wakefulness. There are some disclaimers that it doesn’t trigger for periods of less than 2 minutes, which I understand, but these were more than that. The waking periods aren’t such a big deal — obviously I don’t really need to track them since I’m awake & alert enough to manually note them. But the fact that the unit wasn’t tracking them correctly made me feel like the rest of the data was suspect as well.

So I sent it back today — I’m really disappointed. I’m optimistic, though, about both the Zeo company and the future of sleep sensors (and really a huge variety of biometric sensors). The product design and execution of the unit were both outstanding, and the way it integrates with an online coaching system is excellent. (The chart above is actually a chart I generated myself in Numbers with the CSV export of my sleep data.)

I loved the product, loved the way it made me mindful of sleep patterns & factors that affect it — just didn’t trust the data, ultimately, so felt sort of silly to keep it.