SleepCoacher uses the accelerometer and microphone in your phone to track movements while you're sleeping in order to detect whether you are awake or asleep. This is why you need to keep the phone on the bed, but not under a pillow.
We are a team of computer scientists and designers from Brown University and sleep clinicians from the Brown University Medical School. We have been working on this app for a few years and have conducted previous research to develop something that works. Check out our academic paper here: SleepCoacher.
We only use the phone number in case we cannot deliver your daily update to you via the app. You are welcome to put in a random number in that field if you don't want to provide your real number.
We use your email address as a unique identifier for each person. We don't have any access to your email data at all. If you want to, you can create a separate Gmail account that you use only for SleepCoacher.
Your data is encrypted before it's sent to our servers, and then it's stored on Brown University servers that only the research team has access to. We never share your data with anyone else. Any references for academic purposes are completely anonymized.
Unfortunately, if you have a diagnosed sleep disorder, you cannot use SleepCoacher. Our recommendations target minor sleep issues, so they would not be able to help with diagnosed disorders.
Email us at brown.university.hci@gmail.com and we'll answer all of your questions!