Several prominent gauges and activities on this app don’t make too much sense, at least to U.S. American users.
- It keeps advising us to “do sports,” or asks us to note sport activity in our sleep log tags. Well, most of us don’t do sports, which for us is specifically doing skillful/strenuous activities in competition against an opponent. Am I right to assume you guys mean “exercise” or “working out” instead?
— Accordingly, the symbol for “sports” is the walking stick-person. But this also sometimes shows up on my sleep graph. Does it think I… do sports/exercise in my sleep? LOL There’s no icon for it in the menu that’s supposed to explain what’s in the graph.
(It sometimes coincides with some brief wake periods, but other times there’s no spike yet it’s there anyway. And there’s times I take my phone to the bathroom but it doesn’t have the symbol, but other times I was still sleeping soundly with a peaceful graph and it showed up. Even times I wanted my phone frantically to see if it would show up the next day, but it didn’t. Maybe some hiccups, it’s very occasional. But I just want to see if I’m interpreting its purpose right.)
- “Work days and free days”. The app never seems to ask users about our work schedules in order to establish how to gauge social jetlag. I can again only assume that it automatically equates that with “weekdays and weekends”?
— This distinction is important because a whole lot of us, especially our many low-income members or those in service industry, do not only work on weekdays then have a break over the weekend. Maybe they’ll have Tuesday and Thursday off, but work on all other days including the weekends. Or they have no regular days off at all, except for one week every 4 months, etc.
In fact, maybe it would be useful to add a built-in #work tag that the app uses in deciding if social jetlag is happening or not.
I WOULD suggest that the user be able to fill out what their workdays are, but here’s the problem with that:
Many of us have irregular work/sleep schedules, like those whose work schedules are basically drawn from a hat at random every week (leading to some people working 16 hours from evening until next afternoon, or getting only 4-6 hours of sleep between shifts, one day working in the morning then next day working night shift, etc… The American Dream… ) This sadly is legal and common. But it almost definitely can highly affect such people’s sleep. So it would do well to find a way to factor that into the sleep analysis.
(And in my case, I’m disabled and unable to work, so work/free days aren’t a factor for me.)
Phew, that got long. Um… Gotta go!