We're excited to announce a fantastic new feature that will enhance your sleep tracking experience with our latest update, Pillow v.4.17, now available on the App Store. Imagine controlling your sleep session without even having to launch Pillow - sounds dreamy, right? Well, that dream has now become a reality with Live Activities!
With this much requested feature, you can now track your sleep session right from the Lock Screen of your device. Live Activities are available if you manually start your sleep sessions by pressing "Start" before you drift off into dreamland.
And if you own an iPhone 14 Pro, we've got some great news for you: Pillow's Live Activity will also appear on the Dynamic Island of your iPhone, making it even more convenient and accessible.
The best way to track your sleep without launching Pillow.
Gone are the days of fumbling to check how much time remains until your alarm goes off. With Live Activities, you can easily track the countdown to your wake-up call. Plus, you can effortlessly stop or resume your sleep session if you've paused it for any reason.
For those of you who have set up your sleep tracking preset to include a sleep aid track, Pillow's Live Activities go the extra mile by allowing you to control the playback seamlessly. Say goodbye to interrupted sleep and hello to a smoother, more relaxed bedtime experience.
Control your sleep session right from the Dynamic Island of you iPhone. Play and pause your favourite sleep sounds from the Lock Screen.
To take advantage of this cutting-edge feature, make sure you have iOS version 16.2 installed on your device.
Sleep tracking has never been easier, and we're thrilled to make your nights more restful with Pillow's support for Live Activities feature. So why wait? Head over to the App Store and download Pillow v.4.17 today to experience the future of sleep tracking. Sweet dreams!
Note: Due to limitations on iOS 16, Live Activity sessions longer than 8 hours may not update as expected.
Are you tired of waking up groggy and unrested? Has your partner been complaining about your snoring? Pillow now has a brand new feature designed to help you better understand your snoring.
The Importance of Snoring Trends
Tracking your snoring duration is essential for understanding your sleep quality and overall health. Chronic snoring can lead to sleep deprivation, strained relationships, and even serious health conditions like sleep apnea. By monitoring your snoring habits, you can identify patterns and make necessary changes to improve your sleep. And now, with Pillow's Snoring Trends, you'll have a new tool you need to take control of your nighttime noises.
How it works
Snoring Trends allows you to visualize your snoring habits on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis, providing valuable insights into the patterns of your snoring. Additionally, you can compare your snoring duration with a number of health and sleep-related metrics, such as sleep quality, steps, body weight, and more. This comprehensive view of your health data helps you make informed decisions about your sleep environment, bedtime routine, and lifestyle choices to reduce snoring and improve your overall sleep quality.
What sets Pillow's Snoring Trends apart from other sleep trackers is its ability to show you which hours of the day you tend to snore more. This unique feature can help you pinpoint specific factors that may be contributing to your snoring, such as stress, diet, or sleep position. By understanding the times when your snoring is most prevalent, you can make targeted changes to your routine and sleep better than ever before.
To view your Snoring Trends, you'll need to record a sleep session manually before going to sleep. This ensures that the app captures accurate data about your snoring throughout the night. Don't worry, the recording process is simple, and the app will guide you through each step.
Once you've recorded your first sleep session, the Snoring Trends feature will become available in the Trends section of the app. You can then explore your snoring data and discover patterns to help you make informed decisions about your sleep habits.
By tracking your snoring duration over time, you can make informed decisions about your sleep environment, bedtime routine, and lifestyle choices to reduce snoring and improve your overall sleep quality. Start using Snoring Trends tonight and unlock the secrets to a better night's sleep.
It's a well-known fact that our sleep is not the same throughout the night. Scientists have categorized and named the distinct stages we go through during sleep, and every one is essential. Pillow's sleep stage analysis is a first step towards being more aware of how you slept and how much time you spent in each sleep stage.
Pillow's latest update introduces a big update that can help you discover how these sleep stages change over time. The trends tab now includes three new sections, one for each sleep stage with helpful weekly summaries. If you want to delve deeper, Pillow offers a rich detail view where you can review your sleep stage trend on a weekly, monthly and annual basis. What's more, you can compare the time spent on each sleep stage with various categories from Apple Health like, Steps, Caffeine consumption, Dietary Calories, and more.
Sleeping heart rate trends
Another important aspect of sleep is our heart rate. Pillow 4.7 brings a new section that helps you track your average heart rate during sleep. This trend comes with a quick weekly summary and a detail view that helps you track your average heart rate during sleep on a weekly, monthly and annual basis. This is also a trend that you can compare with various Apple Heath categories and discover potential correlations.
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All results are estimates. Pillow is not a medical application and should not be used to diagnose or treat any condition. Please consult your physician before making any changes to your lifestyle choices or treatment.
A huge update for Pillow's audio recording feature.
As you know, you can let Pillow record sounds during sleep like snoring, sleep talking or any other environmental sounds that could be affecting your sleep. Pillow didn't have a way to categorise these sounds but now it does!
Using machine learning, Pillow can now automatically categorize all your sound recordings under specific categories related to sleep. The categorization takes place using on-device intelligence. Pillow doesn't need to send anything outside your device for this analysis which is great for your privacy. This feature doesn't need an internet connection!
We've redesigned the audio recordings section so that you can get a quick overview of the sounds that Pillow recorded during sleep and compare their duration across sleep sessions. This also opens up a new dimension in sleep tracking that we will be introducing in the next versions of Pillow to provide significant insights like the duration of snoring over time and many more.
Our sound categorization algorithm has been specifically engineered for sounds during sleep, and we're very proud of how well it performs. However, it can continue to evolve and adapt based on your feedback. If you believe that Pillow hasn't categorized a sound under the right category, you have the option to change its category. You even have the option to disable any categories that you don't care about to let Pillow keep track of the categories you care about.
If you have any audio recordings that were recorded before this update, you can let Pillow categorize all of them automatically. Simply go to the sleep session and tap to view your audio recordings.
As always, Pillow cannot record audio if you are tracking sleep automatically by wearing your Apple Watch. To let Pillow record sounds during sleep, you must track your sleep manually by pressing "Start" in Pillow before sleep. You can do that by using your Apple Watch, iPhone or iPad. If you use the Apple Watch, please remember to start the sleep session from your Apple Watch and place your iPhone on the nightstand next to you because Pillow will use the microphone of the iPhone to record audio.
Lastly, if you want to help us improve Pillow's categorization algorithm, you have the option to send us any miscategorized sound anonymously.
We've just released Pillow v.4.4, a major feature release that brings Respiratory Rate tracking to your sleep sessions.
Your respiratory rate during sleep is a crucial sleep metric. Pillow can now help you track your respiratory rate for each of your sleep sessions. All you have to do is wear your Apple Watch during sleep.
When you wake up, you can check your respiratory rate analysis by visiting the "Heart" tab of your sleep analysis. You can find a detailed chart of the average breaths per minute, average, minimum, and maximum "breath per minute" values. You can also enter your age to let Pillow provide a rating of the values tracked.
To use this feature, please make sure you have updated your Apple Watch to the latest version (version 8 or newer) and that you use an Apple Watch Series 3 or newer.
To learn more about how Pillow tracks your respiratory rate and how it provides its rating, tap on the question mark (?) button that appears next to the title "Respiratory rate" under the "Heart" tab.
It's that time of the Year again, and sleep remains as important as ever. Sleeping well during the pandemic can be challenging, yet it can be an essential source of healing and much-needed recuperation. For this Year's Cyber Monday, Pillow's Premium Features will be available at a50% discount for a year.
Those who upgrade now will also benefit from the features of our upcoming big update that will be Pillow v4.0. It's our biggest update yet, and it is right around the corner.
Stay safe and healthy, everyone! With a lot of love from our team at Neybox.
Sleep tracking should be as easy and effortless as possible. With Pillow v.3.6 we’re (finally) introducing automatic sleep tracking using the Apple Watch. This is a very big update that took a lot of time and effort to make sure it works as expected and at the same time feels like a natural addition to Pillow’s existing features.
Here’s a quick overview of what’s new in this version:
Automatic sleep tracking with the Apple Watch
Automatic sleep tracking means that Pillow no longer requires you to press any buttons to track your sleep. If you have an Apple Watch, simply enable Pillow’s “Automatic” mode once and just wear your Apple Watch during sleep. As long as Pillow’s Automatic mode is enabled Pillow will automatically detect and analyze your sleep every day. You can open Pillow anytime during the day to check your sleep analysis, set your mood or add notes to that sleep session.
One thing that’s worth noting is that Alarms and Audio recordings are currently not possible in Automatic mode due to the way Apple Watch and watchOS works. However, we’ll keep looking for ways to bring this functionality.
“Manual” mode is still there
If, for whatever reason, you don’t like Automatic mode or you want to use your iPhone or iPad to track your sleep, you can turn off Automatic mode and switch back to Manual mode. Every single feature available in manual mode is still there and it’s not going away. Manual mode is still a very popular way to track sleep with Pillow and we’ve got great new features coming up for those who want to use Pillow in that mode.
Introducing the Sleep Diary view
Since the very first version of Pillow, when you launch the app, you are taken directly to the Alarm Setup view where you see a picker that you can use to set up your wake-up time. That’s great if you want to use Pillow in manual mode. However, it doesn’t make sense when you when Automatic mode is on. We also felt that Pillow was always missing a view where you can easily get a quick and meaningful summary of your sleep every day. Those two problems led us to create what we call the “Sleep Diary“ view.
The Sleep Diary gives a quick and visual overview of what matters when you want to get an idea of how well you slept last night: Two concentric rings, one for the Time Asleep and the other for your Sleep Quality for that day, and a list of all the detected sleep sessions in a condensed and simplified form. Tapping on each one of the detected sessions takes you to the detail view where you can get in-depth information about that night.
The Sleep Diary is only accessible if you enable Automatic mode both from the iPhone and the Apple Watch. However, we’re working on a major redesign of Pillow that will provide access to that view in both Automatic and Manual modes.
The Sleep calendar
An important part of the Sleep Diary view is the Sleep Calendar. Tapping on the calendar icon on the top right corner displays a monthly calendar that lets you access previous days. If Pillow has detected one or more sessions for that day, you’ll see a little purple dot. Tapping on a day that doesn’t have any sleep sessions detected, will take you to that day and Pillow will automatically try to detect any sessions, provided that you did wear your Apple Watch during sleep. That’s a great way to detect sessions in the past, and you can go as far back in time as you want!
Sleep reports via Rich notifications
You can select to receive a notification when Pillow detects a sleep session or schedule that notification to appear after a specific time. Pillow uses rich notifications so that you can view your sleep report and sleep stage diagram without having to open the app.
Merging and expanding sessions
Last but not least, this update gives even more flexibility in the way you can handle detected sleep sessions. Pillow's edit session dialog now allows you to increase the duration of your sleep session by adding time at the beginning or end of the sleep session or merge two sleep sessions as long as they are less than six hours apart.
What’s next
Now that Automatic sleep tracking mode is done we’ll be working full speed in our next major version, Pillow v.4.0 that will bring many new features and a complete redesign that will make Pillow a lot easier and intuitive to use. Subscribe to our mailing list if you want to receive news and updates about any upcoming features and updates.
Pillow is available for free on the App Store and the new Automatic Sleep tracking features come as a free upgrade to all existing users. Enjoy!
It’s World Sleep Day today, and it goes without saying that this is a special date for Pillow. For us, it’s first and foremost an excellent opportunity to ask one simple question: How does sleep affect my life? Sadly, it’s not a question that gets asked often enough, although it’s surprisingly easy to answer with all the technology and resources that is available out there.
So we urge you to ask yourself this simple question and if by any change you’d like to use Pillow to help you find the answer we’re offering all our Premium Features at a 40% discount just for today.
We’ve been kind of silent during the last few weeks, as we were preparing a major update for Pillow. So, after some painstaking effort, the second version of Pillow is finally here and we’re excited to share with you its new features!
In a nutshell, it’s a rather big update including many popular feature requests, adaptations for the latest devices and iOS 8 HealthKit integration and a brand new iPad version. Let’s dive into some more details about each one.
iPad
As of version 2, Pillow is a Universal app supporting natively both iPhone/iPod and iPad. Adapting the app for iPad presented quite a few challenges: We had to redesign certain aspects of the interface and mainly the daily statistics screen in order to exploit the bigger screen real estate and perform a variety of adjustments in our other views to make things appear and work smoothly. The incorporation of iCloud gave us an “easy”1 way to sync sleep data between the devices so that users owning both devices can do the recording on iPhone which is easier to accommodate on the bed and browse through their statistics on the iPad, enjoying the larger screen.
HealthKit
Yes, finally Pillow supports HealthKit and interacts with Apple’s Health app. We have already described our intentions regarding HealthKit integration in a previous post and especially how we wanted to include and visualise more aspects of a person’s health and well-being and relate them to sleep efficiency. So, apart from feeding the Health app with the sleep duration data, we incorporated ten more data sources that can be viewed in comparison to sleep quality without needing to leave the app. These sources include: heart rate, systolic blood pressure, caffeine intake, dietary calories, blood alcohol content, weight, steps, cycling distance and Nike Fuel. Every one of these metrics is firmly believed, by current sleep research, to be closely associated with sleep efficiency and be a potential contributing factor or a result of sleep disorder. In that perspective we found it very useful for a person to be able to immediately and easily see and assess this kind of information. We must note that all HealthKit derived data remain on the device and are not stored or shared with any kind of external service or the iCloud, in order to ensure absolute data privacy.
iPhone 6 and 6+
Pillow interface is now also supporting the larger iPhones in native resolution. Since we’re very proud for Pillow’s design we got very frustrated seeing our app in the blown-up compatibility mode and we were truly eager to make things right.
Apart from these major changes, we’ve included a number of smaller yet significant upgrades to the app like the fact that we now offer the opportunity to continue an interrupted sleep session when the interruption is less than 10 minutes.
A short glimpse to what’s next
With the introduction of the iPad version and the HealthKit integration, we believe that Pillow is now one of the most complete sleep tracking apps on iOS. But there are a lot more things in our table for the near future:
Snooze Lab expansion: Snooze Lab is one of our favourite features and it’s clear from the feedback we get that a lot of our users love it. We constantly update it with new facts and everyday tips that can make your sleep routine a bit better and we’ve found out that users find it especially useful. In our plans for the near future is turning it into a fully personalised tool, assessing more available data (such as the ones coming from HealthKit) and providing, in collaboration with sleep experts, of tailored advice regarding sleep health.
Sleep tracking improvement: Proper and accurate sleep tracking is an absolute priority for us and we keep improving and fine-tuning our algorithm in every iteration. User feedback has been extremely valuable in that respect and we will be continuously releasing small (and probably silent) updates in order to better support certain cases such as memory mattresses and CPAP devices.
HealthKit: As we explained above we have already taken the first step in HealthKit integration, but we certainly have a few thins in store. So, one of the first things to come is the separation of “Time in Bed” and “Time Asleep” in the data sent to the Apple’s Health app. It’s a popular request from the users, although it presents certain challenges in the technical level. Still, we feel confident that the respective update will hit the store by the middle of December.
Localisation: We envision to bring support for more languages to Pillow, making it more accessible to people without knowledge of English. Due to the fact the the content of the app (and especially that of the Snooze Lab) is large, we expect to gradually start rolling out new languages at the beginning of 2015, incorporating certain major European and Asian languages.
Celebrating our new update, we are releasing Pillow Premium (offered as an in-app purchase) at a 40% discount and now costs only $2.99 for a very limited time! The download and basic use of the app remains free of course.
As always we would very much like you to try Pillow and send us your feedback, positive or negative. Your opinions and remarks are massively helping us to build a better app.
Sleep well!
1 The quotes are in place deliberately since taming iCloud from a developer’s perspective is a true nightmare, but that’s an issue for another post.
One of the new features of iOS 8, and perhaps the one most prominently promoted, is HealthKit. HealthKit, along with Health app, mark Apple’s attempt to bridge the largely disjoint lumps of information about our health that we track every day through our mobile devices or wearables. While there are dozens of great apps for keeping track of our health and fitness status, there is no concise way for them to efficiently communicate and exchange information. Since health and fitness are depending on many factors that are related to and influence one another, having just scattered pieces of information without an easy way to relate them, offers just a fraction of the potential value for to the end-user.
The story so far
When we started building Pillow, our sleep tracking app, we realised that just assessing one’s sleep patterns and quality is simply not enough: we should also provide users with an easy and automated way to correlate sleep with other aspects of their lives and that way help them make more informed decisions on how to improve their sleep quality by adapting their lifestyle. Sleep quality and patterns are deeply linked to many aspects of human life: age, sex, body weight, blood pressure, glucose levels, daily physical activity to name just a few. So, how could we get that kind of information?
A solution would be, of course, to ask the user for it. We could do it, but the drawbacks were many and quite serious: it would cause frustration, require extra effort (imagine switching between three or four apps in order to see and re-input your daily activity to Pillow), effectively ruin the design of the app by adding many extra screens and settings options and could even be considered suspicious in terms of privacy or security.
Since asking the user was out of the equation, our next effort was to find a service that could provide this kind of information to us. The good news is that there are certain services for that purpose. A number of large fitness networks such as RunKeeper as well as Human API already provide ways to interconnect multiple apps, serving as data exchange hubs between them. The bad news, is that to our experience only very few people tend to connect apps there and also that due to the not many developers have apps that support this type of connection.
Despite that, we attempted to make a first step towards this direction by integrating RunKeeper and the M7 processor in the last generation of Apple devices, allowing us to present sleep quality in relation to a user’s daily physical activity. The feedback from our users confirmed that this is indeed something helping people to better relate their exercise to the quality of their sleep and improve their daily routine. Also, we are constantly receiving requests to integrate other apps, wearables and smart devices. But adapting a bunch of different and heterogeneous APIs is a difficult and slow process. The sad fact is that the effort required to properly incorporate even just a couple of the most popular devices or apps is too much for a small team like us.
The road ahead
This is where HealthKit comes into play, serving as the glue between all the different pools of health information residing on our phones. There are two distinct purposes that HealthKit promises to fulfil: the first one is to gather a large variety of users’ health and fitness data to one spot (namely the Health app) while the second, and far more important, is to serve these data to apps, allowing the exchange of related data. Being an Apple service this has certain very strong benefits for both developers and consumers:
1) The adoption of HealthKit promises to be faster and more extensive than any third-party service, since it will built-in and active on iOS 8 from day one.
2) Developers will have a consistent, uniform, native and properly documented way to access a large variety of health data coming from heterogeneous resources, without having to delve into dozens of different APIs to incorporate in their app.
3) Being a native Apple technology developers will quickly incorporate it to their apps in order to gain a competitive advantage. Furthermore, the large amount of iOS users promises that most of the manufacturers in the wearables market will very quickly support it as well.
4) The users will have the ability to easily control data access permissions for all apps in a single point, strengthening the feeling of trust and privacy.
For Pillow we do have ambitious plans for our iOS 8 release. Having a secure and centralised pool of health related information, derived from multiple sources and accessible in a consistent way will give us the opportunity not only to calibrate sleep tracking more appropriately but also to tailor our sleep suggestions and tips to the user’s habits and health condition. And this goes the other way around as well: we will have the ability to export our data to the Health app and make them useful to other apps. We believe that this kind of integration will massively benefit users by increasing the value of the apps they already use and give them a more holistic overview of their health and what they can do to improve it.
