Screenshot Tour: Sleep Bot for Android helps you monitor your sleeping habits

Sleep Bot is a cute little application that helps you get a better understanding of your sleeping habits. Sadly, it doesn't use the phone's accelerometer to check how much you toss and turn at night, which could have been interesting.

Still, for a free application it's quite nice; it has lots of charting options, a widget for the home screen, and a simple data export option. I took a quick spin through the application and even tried it for one night. To take a closer look, keep reading after the fold.

The basic premise of the application is that you tell it when you go to sleep and when you wake up, and it times your sleeping sessions. Above is a crop of the app's home screen, where you can see the going to sleep button. Hit that, and the app starts counting. As you can see, I slept 7 hours and 18 minutes last night, so I have a bit of "extra time." (I told Sleep Bot that I like to sleep 7 hours every night.)

Home screen

This is a full screenshot of the application's Home tab and basic navigation interface. Note the Reset Debt menu option; the app uses the notion that you can accrue "sleep debt" over several days and then "pay it back" by sleeping more. I'm not very sure the human body actually works like that, but I guess it's a useful metaphor for some people.

Graph screen

This is the graph screen that you get under the Tracker tab. As you can see, you get a ton of graphing options. The Pattern button is a bit misleading, since the application does not use the phone accelerometer for monitoring your actual movement pattern while you sleep. So, this button only shows you a pattern of sleeping sessions -- not what goes on within a single session.

Managing Entries

This is the Manage Entries view (found under the Tracker tab), which allows you to check the history for specific sessions, edit them, add new sessions, or export the data as a CSV (which I did, and you can see it at the end of this post).

Resources

The Resources tab is shown above. It's basically a list of short articles with quick reference information concerning sleep. Among other articles not shown are "Sleep Hygiene Basics," "Types of Sleep Disorders," and more. It's nothing you can't find online, but it's handy to have it right there in the app.

Settings

The Settings page is extensive. The Optimal Hour doesn't let you specify when you wish to go to sleep every night, but rather how long you wish to sleep for. You can also set the default graph and have the application pop up a reminder every night and morning so that you won't forget to punch in and out. You can even set a separate, custom text for each of the two reminders. You can have the device switch into Flight Mode when you go to sleep, so calls cannot come in, or if you'd like, you can have it automatically switch to silent mode and switch off the Wi-Fi in order to prevent other alerts.

Also, note the MySleepBot.com option. I suspect a business model hides in there somewhere, but it's inactive for now.

Data Export

Finally, if you're serious about archiving your sleep data, here's the CSV export. This is a crucial feature for me, because I have an existing system to monitor all sorts of vital statistics, so it's good to know that Sleep Bot can play nice with it.

Tags: android, apps, mobile, sleep, sleep bot, SleepBot, utilities