Now that I’ve managed to clear away all of the stressful and/or boring stuff that was keeping me busy, time to do something fun: Christmas shopping! After the break my project is going to be almost halfway through, and although it will be a good while yet before I’m ready to start conducting user tests, it’s time to start getting serious about recruiting participants. After all, the tests are supposed to be about analysing the participants’ data, so they can’t just walk in at their convenience – I need them to spend some time collecting data first, and to do that, they’ll need something to collect the data with.

Our initial idea was to recruit people who are already using a sleep monitor of some kind, and I’m sure we’ll be able to find at least a few of those, but naturally we’ll have a bigger pool of candidates if we have a few devices available to loan to people who don’t have one of their own. Also, it’s obviously useful for me to play with these devices a bit so I can get a better idea of what sort of data they generate and what’s the best way to export it if I want to use it for my research (which I do). Besides, I’m hardly going to spend my entire expense budget on travel even if I go out of my way to pick the most remote conferences I can find to submit papers to.

So I didn’t need to worry too much about what I can afford – one of the many great things about the MSCA fellowship – but that doesn’t mean that the choice of what to buy was straightforward, because the range of consumer products capable of tracking sleep is, frankly, a little bewildering. Some devices you wear on your body, some you place in your bed and some at the bedside, and although I soon decided to narrow down my list of options by focusing on wearables, that still left me with more than enough variety to cope with. Some of these gadgets you wear on your wrist, while others go on your finger like a ring, and the wrist-worn ones range from basic fitness bracelets to high-end smartwatches that will probably make you your protein smoothie and launder your sports gear for you if you know how to use them.

One thing that made the decision quite a lot easier for me is that the manufacturers of fitness bracelets now helpfully include all of their sleep tracking functionality in models that are near the low end of the price spectrum, and since I’m only interested in sleep data, there was no need to ponder if I should go with the inexpensive ones or invest in bigger guns. Also, I had a preference for products that don’t make you jump through hoops if you want to export your data in a CSV file or similar, so I looked at the documentation for each of my candidates and if I couldn’t find a straight answer on how to do that, I moved on. In the end I settled on three different ones: the Fitbit Alta HR, the Withings Steel, and the Oura Ring.

What I particularly like about this trio is that each of these models represents a distinct style of design: the Fitbit is a modern bracelet-style gadget, whereas the Withings looks more like a classic analog wrist watch, and the Oura is, well, a ring. I can thus, to a certain extent, cater for my study participants’ individual stylistic preferences. For example, I’m rather partial toward analog watches myself, so I’d imagine that for someone like me the design of the Withings would have a lot of appeal.

Today’s my last day at work before the Christmas break, and things are wrapping up (no pun intended) very nicely. The orders for the sleep trackers went out last week, this morning I submitted the last of my (rather badly overdue) ethics deliverables to the European Commission, and just minutes ago I came back from my last performance with the DCU Campus Choir for this year. The only thing that may impinge on my rest and relaxation over the next couple of weeks is that there’s a conference deadline coming up immediately after my vacation and I’m quite eager to submit, but I shouldn’t need to worry about that until after New Year. Happy holidays, everyone!