One Ring To Rule Them All? – The SleepOn Go2Sleep Review

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We’re so good at sleeping that we can even do it with our eyes shut. Still, there’s always room for improvement. Sleep tracking is a great way to get to know ourselves a bit better and even improve our way of life. It’s expensive and complicated to get a professional sleep analysis but with health gadgets on the rise, we have more and more options to take things into our own hands. SleepOn Go2Sleep promises to help us understand our sleeping patterns better through its ring-shaped sleep tracker. We got curious about what it can do, so we tested it for a couple of days. Here’s our comprehensive review.

Big idea behind a small device

Spending the night in the hospital wired up to different machines doesn’t sound like the perfect setting for inventing new things. Claus, the founder of SleepOn, had a heart attack in 2015 and was admitted to the ICU. He had terrible sleeping habits that affected his health, but he never bothered to change them. Undergoing polysomnography – the gold standard of sleep tests used to set up diagnoses in sleep medicine -, he had wires and medical devices all around him, which made it quite hard to fall asleep. It’s hard enough to do so after the shocking event of a heart attack, not to mention this unnatural, uncomfortable hospital setting. He was determined to find a lighter wireless device to measure important parameters and the overall quality of sleep for everyday use. A device to help him act more consciously and to be able to keep track of habits affecting his rest.

Before his heart attack, Claus and his team had invented the first heart rate monitoring watch, so this project was exactly their cup of tea. They started it after his recovery and during the experience, the team realized something important: the number of people with sleeping disorders and bad sleeping habits is on the rise.

Sleep is a basic need, not a luxury

One of the reasons is that although quality sleep is a basic need, we treat it as a luxury. It is alarming that according to a Gallup poll, over the past 50 years we have lost one hour on average: we’re sleeping one hour less per night than we did back in the 1950s. Moreover, many people take pride in sleeping as little as possible – especially on college campuses or in the tech sector and Silicon Valley, saying they’ll sleep when they are dead. Well, inadequate shuteye can eventually lead there – it has long been known that sleep deprivation has even been used for a long time as a means of interrogation by many secret services, including the CIA.

Thus, we have known it for a long time that sleep is a very basic human need: it’s not only necessary for maintaining basic cognitive functions, like memory and concentration, and a healthy and stable mental state, but without enough sleep we’re more susceptible to infectious diseases, circulatory problems, and even Alzheimer’s.

Fitting a sleep lab in 6 grams

It’s easy to see why we were so excited to test Go2Sleep, SleepOn’s sleep tracking ring. It’s small, it’s smart and has the potential to improve our quality of life. Opening the box, we can find the tracker itself, three different-sized silicone rings, a charger, a micro USB cable, and the user manual with a warranty card.

The minimalist and smart design makes it easy to set up the ring. The magnetic charger takes around two hours to fully charge the device and the battery lasts up to 3 days. To be able to see your data and keep track of your habits, you need to download the app (available on iOS and Android as well), which requires quite a few permissions, including access to location details, camera (if you want a personalized profile picture), information on other apps, phone identity and accounts.

The app is user-friendly and transparent, with short comments explaining all the technical terms. It uses Bluetooth to communicate with the tracker, which works well, but unfortunately, the app itself only works with Bluetooth on. After waking up and taking the ring off, a report is being generated, which we can view after a short synchronization period.

It promises to measure heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and movements to calculate sleep stages (awake time, light sleep, deep sleep, REM phase) and sleep apnea times (periods of shallow or no breathing) from these parameters. SleepOn offers a comfortable way to keep an eye on your sleep apnea score – we even got to know that up to four mild episodes are considered normal.

Our personal experience

You wear the ring on your ring finger, the device facing your palm. It’s light and despite the snug-fitting silicone ring, it’s comfortable, no wires needed so it doesn’t disturb your sleep. The producers even made the gadget slightly waterproof, so you don’t have to take it off for a light handwash – although they don’t recommend it if you swim in your sleep…

Unfortunately, not all features work as expected. The charger, the measuring device, and the app work well on their own but the program calculating results could use some improvement.

After a good night’s sleep, you get a sleep score based on the overall quality of your snooze and some tips on what needs improvement. There are easy-to-interpret diagrams for every category measured. Sleep stages are calculated from heart rate, heart rate variability, and movement, while SleepOn Go2Sleep lets you monitor your HR and SpO2 in real-time. Unfortunately, the sleep stage calculation did not work most of the time. Sleep stages and cycles were missing, and we couldn’t resolve this issue with the help of the support team either. We contacted customer services via their website, and they replied within a day. So, it’s easy to get in touch with them, the design of the service looks great, and they are quick to answer but could not help that much.

And since this feature didn’t work properly, we couldn’t use the smart alarm either. That’s a pity as waking up at the right time during your sleep cycle could make all the difference in your mornings and it’s a must-have when it comes to sleep tracking devices.

On the bright side: sleep apnea tracking

What worked well is the sleep apnea tracking and alarm system. When your blood oxygen levels drop too much, the ring vibrates. That’s important because mild sleep apnea can be hard to diagnose as people don’t even realize they pause breathing during sleep. This state has negative effects on many organs, including the brain. Keeping an eye on this data could help detect early symptoms and monitor them day by day.

In addition, you have the option to assign labels to your sleep, which is a great way to help yourself be more conscious about how your actions during the day influence the quality and quantity of your sleep.

All-in-all, we feel that even if SleepOn Go2Sleep may not be the best sleep-tracking device on the market at the moment, it still has a lot to offer. It keeps track of a lot of data at the same time and gives new and interesting information about our habits. It is comfortable, lightweight and waterproof. We were disappointed by two of the main functions not working properly- sleep cycle tracking and the smart alarm. One would provide important information on our health and the other would help us feel more relaxed in the mornings.

Although Go2Sleep by SleepOn could definitely help Gollum get his beauty sleep, it did not rule all gadgets we have tried in the last few years. With only a few improvements it could be a precious tool for everyday life, but until then we recommend you select a more trusted option.

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