Although the iPhone’s Clock app doesn’t often see many changes, Apple snuck an interesting new feature into iOS 10 that allows your iPhone to perform basic sleep tracking without any additional accessories. In the app, you’ll find a new Bedtime section that lets you set up bedtime reminders and wakeup alarms that work separately from the normal clock alarms.
On the Bedtime screen, you’ll see a circular display where you can draw an arc to represent your preferred bedtime and wakeup times; the total hours of sleep your chosen times represent will be shown in the middle. Tapping on Options in the top left corner lets you choose to only apply your bedtime schedule on specified days of the week, select the alarm wake up sound, and choose how many minutes before bedtime you’d like to receive a bedtime reminder.
Notably, Apple has added nine unique new sounds in this section that aren’t available for normal alarms, and many of these are more soothing sounds suitable for slowly waking up. There’s also a “None” option available if you’d like to use the sleep tracking feature without it being tied to an alarm — in this case, you’ll still get a visual alarm on your iPhone screen at the selected wakeup time, so you can acknowledge getting up, but no sound will be made.
There’s more to this feature than simply setting a bedtime reminder and alarm, however. Once you’ve configured your Bedtime settings, your iPhone will track your sleep based on when you actually go to bed and when you wake up.
It will also make note of any times where you happen to get up in the night and reach for your iPhone — the accelerometer appears to be used to determine when you’re using your iPhone, and therefore not sleeping. A bar graph at the bottom of the Bedtime screen shows you the current week’s sleep analysis, and the Clock app also records this data into the iOS Health app so it can be tracked alongside your other health stats. The Show All Data section in the Health app can be used to view more detailed information on the specific times that iOS 10 determined you were actually in bed — or not.
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