Jawbone, maker of the Jawbone UP activity tracker, launched an app today with a different take on sleep tracking. The app, UP Coffee, helps users regulate their caffeine intake and understand how caffeine affects their sleep. While the app is open for anyone to download, not just owners of a Jawbone UP wristband, if the user owns the UP or UP24, he or she can also sync UP Coffee with that device.
UP Coffee provides users with more information about how their caffeine intake affects sleep, the more they log in the app. After three days, the app will compare the user to other coffee drinkers and after one week, the app will provide the user with his or her "caffeine persona". After 10 days, the app can give the user more actionable information, such as how much sleep the user will lose on average for every 100mg of caffeine he or she ingests.
Users can log coffee, tea, an energy drink, or even chocolate in the app and will see a visual display of how much caffeine they've had or where they are on Jawbone's spectrum of "wired" to "sleep ready" throughout the day. When the user syncs the app with the UP or UP24 band, UP Coffee will also make correlations between caffeine intake and the user's sleep patterns.
Jawbone Vice President of Product Management and Strategy Travis Bogard, said in a statement that the company is investing heavily in data and learning about behavior change in order to help users reach their goals.
"By leveraging these insights within the UP system, we're beginning to help people achieve real change," Bogard said in a statement. "Our latest data shows a strong connection between how much we sleep and how we feel the next day, and these are exactly the kinds of correlations that can be powerful motivators to people on a daily basis."
UP Coffee was developed based on a Jawbone study of over 1,600 UP users. Jawbone looked at data from more than 5,000 nights of sleep to collect data on the relationship between the user's sleep metrics and information they submitted on how they felt the next day. The data was compiled through three separate surveys.
Jawbone found that around 25 percent of UP users in the study were reporting difficulty falling asleep and of that group, around 50 percent said this was because of stress, 20 percent said it was because the temperature of the room, and 18 percent said it was because they were not tired.
Many other activity trackers have developed sleep tracking features for their devices. Fitbit added sleep tracking to its wristworn activity trackers Fitbit Flex and Fitbit Force, but only if these devices were worn at night.
A few months ago, Basis Science added an advanced sleep analysis feature for its wristworn activity tracker. The sleep features will be available on the new version of Basis' device, Carbon Steel Edition, as well as the original.