You Can Now Track Your Sleep Without Wearing Anything

SMART RINGS, BANDS, AND watches will all tell you how you slept last night, down to your heart-rate variability (HRV) and blood oxygen. They track how long it took you to nod off, how often you stirred, and how much of the night you spent in deep sleep and REM. It’s a remarkable amount of insight for a device that sits on your wrist or finger all night.

There’s just one big, annoying, unavoidable catch: Whatever wearable you prefer, you have to keep the thing charged. A smartwatch is the worst offender. You have to top it off sometime during the day, maybe while you shower, so it doesn’t die in the middle of the night. Smart rings and bands last longer—up to a week or two between charges—but even then, not everyone finds them comfortable to wear overnight (and comfort can be an issue with watches at night as well).

The good news is a newer group of trackers is starting to emerge with a fix. They don’t go on your body, and they don’t need charging. Instead, they sit on your nightstand or slide under your mattress, fading into the background so you barely know they’re there.

Meet the Hatch Sleep Clock

The Hatch Sleep Clock is one of the newest contactless trackers on the market. It sits on your nightstand, a few feet from you and pointed at your torso, and uses non-contact radar to pick up your presence and movement. After an initial setup through the Hatch app, you press a button on top of the clock to start tracking each night.

Rather than giving you a nightly score, Hatch looks for patterns across days and weeks, then suggests small routine changes to improve your sleep. The brand argues that nightly scores can make people more anxious about sleep, which undercuts the whole point of tracking. Hatch’s recommendations take about a week to kick in, since the Sleep Clock needs a few nights to learn how you sleep first.

Say your bedtime keeps drifting later as the week goes on. The Sleep Clock will notice the shift and suggest ways to get back on schedule. Or say you consistently sleep better on nights when you fall asleep to one of Hatch’s wind-down sounds. It notices that pattern and recommends making calming audio, like an audiobook or short meditation, a regular part of your bedtime routine. As a bonus, the Sleep Clock doubles as a sunrise alarm, helping you wake up gradually instead of to a jarring beep.

Hatch isn’t the only company betting you’d rather not babysit a wearable before bed. Withings makes a thin pad, the Sleep Tracking Pad, that slides under your mattress. It reads your heart rate, breathing, and snoring through the mattress and gives you a sleep score in the morning. Eight Sleep goes further with its latest Pod 6, a mattress cover with sensors built in. It tracks your heart rate and breathing like the Withings pad does, plus your sleep stages and HRV, while it heats and cools each side of the bed. And of course, it offers all the climate control benefits that Eight Sleep has become known for.

Are Contactless Sleep Trackers Accurate?

Wearables still have the edge on raw accuracy because they measure your body directly, but are still fairly directional compared to clinical sleep testing. The new Apple Watch Series 12 reads your pulse every five seconds and checks your HRV as often as every five minutes, and Apple says it’s the most accurate heart-rate sensing the company has put in a watch. The Oura Ring and Whoop both work the same way, pressing optical sensors against your skin and adding a motion sensor to sort out when you’re awake, restless, or deeply asleep.

Contactless trackers never sit against your skin, so they infer your sleep from breathing and movement instead—whether from the nightstand or through the mattress. That makes them good at big-picture stuff, like when you got into bed, how long you slept, and whether your schedule is getting more consistent. Hatch says the Sleep Clock’s detection is 97 percent accurate compared to clinical sleep studies, which land around 99 percent.

The short answer, though, is that contactless trackers are accurate enough for most people. In our sleep tracker buying guide, wearables came out ahead because they pull more direct data off your body, while pads and covers were more suited to tracking trends over time. Dr. Chris Winter, a neurologist and sleep specialist, puts the Withings pad right alongside the Oura and Whoop, and says sleep trackers in general have gotten better at measuring how much you sleep, even if they still can’t reliably tell the sleep stages apart.

Is a Contactless Sleep Tracker Right for You?

Contactless trackers won’t replace a wearable for anyone chasing every metric. Beyond sleep tracking, a ring, band, or watch follows you through the day, logging workouts, steps, and recovery, while a bedside clock or mattress pad does none of that. But if sleep is all you’re after, and you’d rather not wear or charge anything, the Hatch Sleep Clock, Withings Sleep Tracking Pad, and Eight Sleep Pod 6 can track your sleep night after night with nothing to wear, charge, or think about.