Buying Guide: 2020's Best Sleep Tracker

Do you have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep? Today's high-tech sleep tracking devices make it possible for you to dive into the quantity and quality of your much-deserved rest. The best sleep trackers can tell you exactly what happens between the time you fall asleep and wake up in the morning by specifically measuring your movement, breathing, temperature, and heart rate. Through detailed analytics, the best sleep trackers help you explain how and why you feel a certain way in the morning, making it no longer a mystery. Sleep trackers come in a variety of forms from wearing it on your wrist as an analog watch or as a slim wrist band. Let’s take a look at the three best sleep trackers of 2020 based on appearance, characteristics, fitness tracking, and sleep capabilities.

The Garmin Vívosport is the most multi-functional of any of the sleep trackers on our list, making it our editor's pick. Wearing your Vívosport at night paints a clear picture of your sleep quality. This sleep tracking device has advanced heart rate monitoring and tracks your nightly movements. When you wake up in the morning, a full sleep report will be waiting for you on the Garmin Connect App, which is available for both IOS and Android. With built-in GPS capabilities, you can track workout activities such as walking, running, biking, swimming, and hiking. The Vívosport comes pre-loaded with fitness activities to help you get more exercise, which can directly improve your sleep. The Vívosport keeps track of your everyday stressors through all-day stress tracking to help determine and pinpoint moments of anxiety. The Vívosport comes in the sizes small/medium and large.

• The Vívosport features a long battery life of up to seven days without needing to charge your device and a slim, comfortable band.
• The always-on color screen sleep tracker has impressive features like wrist-based heart rate monitoring, heart rate variability, maximum oxygen uptake (VO2 max), stress levels, and sleep quality analysis.

• Those Looking for Detailed Sleep Reports
• Anyone Who Wants Max Fitness and Sleep Tracking Capabilities With Minimal Bulk
• Anyone Who Wants to Monitor Stress and Use the GPS Capabilities for Workouts
• Those Who Want to Take Their Device in the Water

The Polar A370 offers all-day activity monitoring and in-depth sleep analysis, which includes sleep time, wake time, sleep interruptions, total sleep time, and sleep continuity. Using the accompanying Polar Flow App, available on IOS and Android devices, you can rate your sleep to track how you personally feel about the quality of your rest, which can be helpful in detecting patterns and communicating with your doctor. Since how we feel is often an indicator of our overall health, noting can be one of the most important, yet easily overlooked, pieces of data to collect.

• Your Polar A370 comes equipped with the advanced, Polar Sleep Plus, to track your sleep quality and provide insights to reach the sleep you deserve.
• This sleep tracking device offers continuous and accurate heart rate monitoring to understand your heart's daily patterns.
• The Polar A370 is your go-to when it comes to tracking your fitness output and calories. The Polar A370 tracks your heart rate and activity levels to accurately calculate your calories burned.
• Inactivity alerts remind you to take a break and move.
• Use your Polar A370 as a smartwatch to see incoming calls, texts, emails, and calendar events.

• Value-Conscious Consumers
• Anyone Looking for Advanced Sleep Data
• Those Who Want to Track Their Calories and Fitness Goals

The most fashionable tracker on the list, the Garmin Vívomove HR, looks like a classic watch thanks to the real watch hands that move and display the time. Now, for the cherry on top: it is a touchscreen that has smartwatch features and monitors your overall wellness and sleep.

• This sleep tracker device comes equipped with advanced sleep monitoring to track the amount of sleep you get as well as how much time you spend in each sleep stage. It pulls data from your heart rate and your heart rate variability to determine how long you slept in light, deep, and REM sleep. You can track your statistics in the accompanying Garmin Connect App, which is available for both IOS and Android.
• The Vívomove HR includes all-day stress tracking. To keep your stress in check, the wellness monitoring tools let you know when it's time to take a break or relax with a deep breathing exercise. And since stress impacts sleep by pumping out increased levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, in turn, stress can keep you awake at night and leave you exhausted the next morning.
• To stay connected to those you love, this hybrid smart and analog watch allows you to control your music and notifications such as incoming calls, texts, and calendar reminders.
• This best wearable sleep tracker allows you to monitor your steps, calories, distance traveled, heart rate, workout intensity in minutes, and the maximum rate of oxygen you consumed during your workout (VO2 max).

• Anyone Who Wants a Fashionable Tracker
• Anyone Interested in Monitoring Their Stress Levels, Sleep Stages, and Fitness Goals

Buying the best sleep trackers are more complex than just purchasing a watch. To find one that's right for you, you need to start with the data the device delivers when tracking your sleep and activity. You'd then want to look at how the data is presented. Does it have an app? Does it use special software? From there, you can sort out what features are going to be most useful to you.

The best sleep trackers will typically have some or all of the following features:

• Heart Rate Monitor
• Accelerometer
• Body Temperature
• Humidity
• Bluetooth

Depending on the make and model, a sleep tracker may also record:

• Pulse Oximeter
• Glucose
• Blood Pressure
• UV light
• Ambient Light Sensor
• ECG
• Brain Wave Monitoring

If you're primarily concerned about your sleep, you'll want a sleep tracker that measures your cardiac functions. This can include heart rate, ECG, or blood oxygen levels.

Wearing a sleep tracker on your wrist holds the key to providing insightful data on your sleep stages, nightly movement, and the time you spent asleep, awake, and in REM sleep. Sleep trackers also translate into everyday life by including data on your stress levels, fitness statistics, and information on the number of calories you burned. An added bonus? Sleep trackers often have smartwatch capabilities, so you can keep up with your notifications such as calls, texts, and calendar events all in one place. The best sleep trackers are an all-encompassing combination of the time you spend asleep and awake.