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January 23, 2017

Pillow v.3.1: Heart rate analysis, Apple Watch and more

The first big update for Pillow in 2017 has arrived packed with many improvements, fixes, and much-requested features. Here’s a quick look at what’s in this version:

Heart rate analysis during sleep

Pillow’s advanced sleep tracking and analysis algorithm takes another leading step forward by introducing heart rate analysis during sleep time. Being the first of its kind to provide this kind of depth and accuracy, Pillow now displays a detailed graph of the heart rate during each sleep session. The heart rate graph is overlaid on top of the sleep analysis chart to provide unprecedented insight into the changes in the heart rate during each sleep stage. Tapping on the graph, it is possible to view individual heart rate values and review high, low and average values for the entire sleep session as well as the same values for each stage of sleep.

To do that, Pillow uses heart rate data from Apple Health as they are gathered by wearable devices such as the Apple Watch, provided that the user has given explicit permission to Pillow to use those data. Also, Pillow on the Apple Watch has been updated to include the heart rate chart during sleep along with the sleep analysis chart.

The integration of Heart Rate analysis from wearable devices marks the step towards the realization of a greater vision that we have for Pillow. To connect with a wide variety of services and smart appliances that share relevant data and functionality with Pillow so that it may become the heart of the sleep monitoring and improvement experience.

A radically updated Apple Watch app

The release of Pillow of the Apple Watch and the subsequent release of Apple Watch OS 3.0 combined with valuable feedback from our users lead to so many changes and improvements that we practically re-wrote the entire app. Firstly, Pillow for the Apple Watch is now a lot easier to use requiring fewer steps to start and stop a sleep session and the entire UI has been cleaned up to load faster and be more informative. We’ve also made significant improvements in the way sleep session data is synced at the end of the session and we’ve added a completely new heart rate analysis view in the statistics.

Of course we’re still at the beginning. We have so many more updates and ideas for Pillow on the Apple Watch, some of which also depend on the evolution of the watchOS itself. A lot of people ask us why Pillow on the Apple Watch doesn’t perform automatic sleep tracking. Pillow’s algorithm uses motion data recorded from the Apple Watch to perform sleep analysis and this data can only be obtained if the user explicitly starts a session from the Apple Watch as required by watchOS 3. Other apps that claim to automatically detect sleep start and stop times don’t use motion data which, based on our research and tests, leads to wildly inaccurate sleep analysis.

We are very optimistic about the future of the Apple Watch and watchOS as we closely monitor any enhancement and improvement that becomes available to third-party apps like Pillow. Automatic sleep tracking, use of haptic feedback for the alarm, audio recording using the Apple Watch are features that we definitely want to implement once those technical obstacles are overcome.

Time to sleep and better detailed sleep statistics

Knowing how much time it took to fall asleep each night is valuable information and may explain various decisions and choices that may have affected sleep quality. This is why now Pillow comes an updated sleep analysis view to accommodate precisely this kind of information. In addition, we’ve made a number of updates in the detailed statistics views so that it is now easier to compare Time asleep vs. Time in Bed on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis.

More options and customisations

Pillow v.3.1 comes with many more improvements and enhancements including the much requested ability to customise the level of the alarm volume and the duration of the sleep aid sounds. Last but not least we’ve updated Snooze lab with more insights, tips and improvements that we hope that you will enjoy.

Automatic sleep tracking on the Apple Watch and the future

Pillow on the Apple watch uses motion and heart rate data recorded from the Apple Watch to perform sleep analysis. However, motion data can only be obtained if the user explicitly starts a session from the Apple Watch as required by watchOS. Automatic sleep tracking on the Apple Watch is currently possible using heart rate data only, which based on our research, can lead to very inaccurate sleep analysis. That said, we are working on ways to use heart rate data in other interesting ways including automatic sleep start and stop time detection. Hopefully, the ongoing evolution of the Apple Watch will lift many of the currently imposed restrictions and we promise we'll do our best to make Pillow as frictionless to use as possible!

Pillow v.3.1 is available on the App Store as free download with an one-time in-app purchase to unlock all the Premium Features.

January 7, 2016

Infographic: Why sleep is so important?

The importance of sleeping well is often overlooked. Despite the fact that sleep science and still in its infancy, we have a plethora of studies, surveys and discoveries demonstrating just how sleep can affect our everyday lives on a surprising level. Below is an infographic containing some of the most important facts and figures about sleep that we have gathered as part of our ongoing research for Pillow, our sleep tracking app.

November 30, 2015

Cyber Monday Deal: Pillow’s Premium features at 60% Discount.

It's that Cyber Monday of the year and we are offering Pillow at a great big discount. Enjoy and sleep well!

Click here to get it now

October 20, 2015

Introducing: Getting started with Pillow

It's been over 18 months since the release of Pillow and we are already preparing the v.3.0 with many new features that will take Pillow to whole new level. All this progress wouldn't have been possible without the invaluable feedback that we have gathered from our amazing users that took the time to share their ideas and suggestions on how to make Pillow even better.

Pillow has been praised for its clean and simple user interface but it remains a large app with many features. This is why some of our users have suggested a quick and simple guide around Pillow's basic and most frequent tasks. Today we are introducing a new section on our website: "Getting started with Pillow". This section includes short videos that answer simple questions such as how to start a sleep session, how to start a power nap, how to view last night's statistics, how to listen to your audio recordings and many more.

And this is just the beginning. We'll be adding more videos in this section as the time progresses and we gather more feedback from you. As always, we are open to more suggestions and ideas, even for this new section itself. Visit our "Support & Feedback Center" to let us know. We'll be more than happy to hear from you.

April 15, 2015

Pillow v.2.2, a closer look

Our latest and greatest update for Pillow (v.2.2) is finally public. This version comes with several new features and changes that we believe are worth the time to explore and explain a little further.

12 hour format.

The most requested feature by our users right from the beginning was the option to display time in 12 hour format. Although it might seem trivial, this time format has lot of quirks mainly because the ‘am’/‘pm’ indicator is not the same around the world and it’s length varies and the time shows up in lots of places inside Pillow.

The best part is that you don’t have to do anything to switch between 12 and 24 time format. Pillow automatically detects the format you have selected for your device and adjusts accordingly. [screenshot of the two time format options]

Snooze Lab Insights: Discover your optimal bed time

Version 2.2 of Pillow introduces a new Snooze Lab item which we call Insights. Insights let you discover more about your sleep by analysing data from your sleep sessions.

The first in the series of Snooze Lab insights is about your Optimal bed time: Pillow analyses your sleep sessions and determines around what time you are most likely to sleep better based on the relationship between and the beginning of each sleep session and its quality.

What’s more, you can optionally allow Pillow to display a notification on your iOS device 30 minutes earlier, so that you can start preparing for bed time.

A change in the way the sleep session stops

One of the biggest changes you are going to notice is in the way Pillow lets you stop a sleep session. We had to replace the “Swipe to stop” method, as required by Apple’s review team, to avoid confusion with the "Swipe to unlock functionality" on iOS.

So we decided to replace it with a ‘Stop’ button that you have to press and hold for a few seconds to avoid accidental termination of the session.

The v.8.3 bug

This update of Pillow also happened to coincide with the update of iOS to version v.8.3 which introduced a nasty bug that made Pillow freeze and become unresponsive. We want to thank all of you for your patience and support during the time it took to resolve this issue and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused.

As always this is a free update for all of our users. If you like Pillow please consider writing a short review on the App Store. It will really help other users discover Pillow as well.

December 29, 2014

Introducing: Better Sleep Magazine

When set out to build Pillow, our goal was to build something beyond the confines of a good sleep tracking application that measures your sleep cycles. We also wanted to provide a high quality resource that will enable smarter decisions to improve sleep quality and gain deeper insight about each one’s personal sleep profile.

Our first step towards that direction was Snooze lab, constantly updated with smart recommendations, experiments and personalised tips. We are already working on its evolution and we are very excited about it. But this post is not about Snooze lab.

Today we are announcing a small but significant addition. It’s an on-line publication powered by Flipboard’s amazing platform. It’s name is ‘Better Sleep’ and it’s a weekly online magazine featuring a specially curated selection of articles related to Sleep Health, the science of sleep and useful tips recommended by sleep experts.

The format is very new and we are still experimenting with it but we really believe you are going to love it. It’s available for free though flipboad, accessible from your favourite mobile device or your desktop browser: here

Take a look, browse it’s content and let us know what you think.

Sleep well.

September 16, 2014

Visualising your sleep with Pillow

One of our great concerns when developing Pillow was how to format our sleep diagrams in order to depict sleep patterns in the best possible way. We had to find a way to combine two different needs: the requirement to show data as accurately as possible and also to provide a diagram that wouldn’t be too complex for the users to understand. Before delving into why we ended up with our sleep analysis diagram, let’s see what happens when a person is sleeping.

How sleep works

According to the universally accepted sleep studies, sleep can be divided in 4 stages and 2 categories, namely Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and Non-REM (NREM). The stages are:

N1 (NREM): It’s the first stage of sleep, where a person is between wakefulness and sleep. Muscular and eye activity is present in this stage and it’s the easiest sleep stage to wake from.
N2 (NREM): In this stage the person asleep becomes harder to wake. The muscular activity slows down significantly but one still reacts to environmental stimuli (noises, light etc). Along with N1, they can be considered as Light Sleep.
N3 (NREM): Also known as Slow Wave Sleep (SWS), it’s what we would casually call Deep Sleep. There is practically no muscular and eye movement and the person asleep is not reacting to most environmental stimuli.
REM: In REM sleep, also known as the dream stage, things are getting more complex. While the person asleep exhibits high brain activity, comparable to being awake, it’s the hardest sleep stage to awake from and at the same time the muscles are completely paralysed. The muscle paralysis is considered to being a safety mechanism in order for the sleeper not to violently react in vivid dreams. Although the precise effects of REM sleep are still under research, it’s considered to be very important for increasing the brain’s ability to learn complex tasks.

During a sleep session, the different stages alternate in successions that are called sleep cycles. The order in a complete sleep cycle is normally N1, N2, N3, N2, REM. A sleep cycle lasts for about 90 to 110 minutes in adults and time in each sleep stage varies, with deep sleep occupying the first hours after getting asleep while REM increases during the sleep cycles before natural awakening. An adult without sleep disorders is expected to spend about 20% of his sleep time in REM.

Sleep Diagrams in Pillow

The most common pattern sleep apps use to depict the different stages during a sleep session is that of a continuous line oscillating between the different sleep stages. To be honest, that was the first thing we tried with Pillow as well, but we found out that there are is a major problem with this approach.

A continuous line has the inherent disadvantage that certain points would fall between sleep stages. But, according to sleep research, sleep stage transitions can occur in an instant. Furthermore, there is no scientific definition for being between two sleep stages: your sleep always falls into exactly one of the aforementioned stages and not somewhere in-between. So, a curved, continuous line would not provide accurate information. It may be suitable for showing the level of motion during the night, but not for depicting the sleep stages. This is in accordance with how Hypnograms look like: what you get is a stepped line and not a curved one, exactly because the transitions between sleep stages happen instantaneously.

Of course, anyone could object that Hypnograms rely on EEG, measuring the exact activity of the brain, something impossible to be done with a smartphone. So, since most of sleep apps measure motion during the night through the device’s sensors, it would be more appropriate to present the level of movement instead of the sleep stages. While this may stand true for many of the sleep apps on the market, it’s not the case in Pillow. In our app, except tracking motion, we use the device’s microphone to detect fluctuations in sound levels during the night, and combine all of our data through a Markovian model to assess the sleep stage a user is currently in. The precision is not (and cannot ever be) equivalent to that of a specialised device but we believe it’s very good given the capabilities of the device.

So, hypnogram seemed like the best fit for showing our sleep analysis. We went a small step further, giving the various stages a different colour, in order to make it even more legible to the average person without sacrificing the quality of the provided information.

Sleep quality

Apart from the sleep analysis, Pillow gives each sleep session a quality score as a percentage. Let’s dive into a bit more depth on how this is calculated.

It’s fairly obvious, that the efficiency of our sleep is not always the same. We feel that some nights we sleep very good, waking up rested and full of activity while in other cases even 8 hours of sleep can leave us groggy and unsatisfied. The truth is that sleep efficiency is depending on a large variety of factors except sleep time. Thanks to the capabilities of modern devices we can measure many of these parameters including the sleep cycle duration, the percentage of sleep time in each stage, the disturbances through the night, the environmental noises and the times awakened to name a few. Based on these measurements and using scientifically accepted sleep quality assessment methods, we calculate a sleep score (sleep quality) which is presented as a percentage, since it’s the universally most easy to understand scale.

As we said above, nothing can be perfectly accurate and since self reporting has proven to be of major importance in understanding sleep, starting from version 1.2 we added Pillow a couple of features that will help users correlate the calculated quality with their personal feeling of their sleep. Mood reporting allows anyone to easily record their mood when waking and compare it with the sleep quality calculated by the app. Sleep Notes also help users registering information regarding their sleep that cannot be tracked by the app (for example large caffeine consumption, being sick, being very tired etc). By using advanced tracking in combination with self-reporting we tried to give a tool that will truly give the opportunity to understand sleep much better.

If you choose to give Pillow a try, we'll be more than happy to receive your comments on how our sleep tracking works for you.

July 3, 2014

Power naps and Mood tracking added in Pillow v.1.1

We're really excited to announce v1.1 of Pillow: Apart from numerous fixes and improvements in speed and stability, this is the first version of Pillow to include 2 major feature additions: Naps and Mood tracking.

Naps

Short periods of sleep, also known as naps, have been shown to improve alertness, memory, motor skills, decision-making, and mood. To help you track your nap's quality and statistics, we added nap detection in Pillow right from the beginning.

Because of the way sleep works, the duration of a nap may have different effects on our body and mind so choosing the right period of time to take a nap can make a serious difference. That's why in this version of Pillow, we've included 3 pre-defined nap modes. "Power nap", "Recovery nap" and "Full cycle" modes. Unlike other similar apps out there, Pillow provides detailed statistics for each nap session and audio recordings.

To access the available nap modes, simply swipe up from the bottom of the app to reveal the sleep modes selection and then swipe horizontally to select the nap mode you prefer.

Mood tracking

Tracking your mood after a sleep session is an important aspect of your sleep quality. Pillow now lets you optionally record your mood at wake up time from a scale of one to five.

Your choice is then displayed on the Daily statistics view and you can edit it anytime by tapping on the mood icon displayed for each session. We've also added a new chart in the detailed statistics view, accessible by rotating your device in landscape mode, so that you can view your mood throughout time just as you can do for your sleep quality.

Version 1.1 of Pillow is now available on the AppStore and you can get it now at 40% discount for a limited time.

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