Who Tracks the Sleep Trackers? Meet Jesse Cook

The sleep tracker has become the latest must-have tech gadget. I've gone through at least half a dozen myself as my efforts in tracking my sleep have gone through a number of iterations.

The obsession with the data sleep trackers spit out can cause its own special brand of insomnia - orthosomnia, the sleep nerds call it. (We discussed orthosomnia a couple of times on the show before. We've talked to Dr. Seema Khosla about it, and Dr. Jade Wu, among others.)

However, trying to find just the right way to go about tracking my sleep served a specific purpose, in my case. I'm writing a book about my lifelong battle with insomnia, and I'm trying to help others by road-testing a number of things that claim to give you a good night's sleep. (I leaked the first three chapters in audiobook form here.) The trouble is, if I don't have a dependable sleep tracker, I have no real way of knowing what worked and what didn't.

That's where Seema Khosla comes in.

She's the former chair of the Presidential Technology Committee of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. As a result, she has seen every gadget and piece of gear that's out there. She has also tried several of them herself.

It Was Like Christmas!

Last week, Seema sent me a large box, filled with sleep tracker after sleep tracker. I now have more of these gadgets myself than your average Best Buy.

However, my conversations - both on and off the air - with Seema have led me to make a change to my original plan for the book, which was to use a Fitbit Versa 2 as my go-to for tracking my sleep. Few people would take my amateur research project seriously, because the data was likely to be flawed right out of the gate.

We talk our way through an "unboxing" of the various devices she sent me.

For World Narcolepsy Day, here's our episode with Julie Flygare.

And here's the Talking Sleep podcast from the AASM.