Sleep monitoring apps become more and more popular and everyday new ones emerge on Google Play or the Apple App Store. Most of them just help you track your sleep, others remind you to go to bed, provide a sleep score or sleep goal, and give concrete tips and guidelines for better sleep. From our work with paper and electronic sleep diaries, we know that often simply tracking your sleep and thus allowing you to see your sleep habits and trends can help you to improve your sleep. There are also apps, which try to use on-board phone sensors (e.g. sound recorder) to detect respiratory events. Despite this evolving landscape of sleep apps, evaluation data are rarely available and for most apps scientific evidence is missing. Given the high prevalence and burden of sleep disorders and the limited access to specialist sleep services for many patients, we think that sleep apps could be a powerful tool that offer both screening and delivery of therapy for sleep problems. We are therefore highly motivated to help develop a clinically validated sleep app with input from patient users and would love to hear more thoughts on this topic.
