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Devices & health

Apple Watch, Biometrics & Apple Health

Read your wrist sensors beside your snoring, and connect any wearable through Apple Health.

On this page

Snore Timeline listens through your phone, but your Apple Watch adds a second layer to the night: heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, and more, measured at your wrist while you sleep. This page covers the watch companion app, the live view during a recording, the biometrics that sit beside your snoring in the morning, and how Apple Health ties everything together so wearables like Oura, Whoop, Garmin, and Ultrahuman can join in too.

Health note

Every number on this page comes from your watch's own sensors, read through Apple Health. They are shown for your awareness and for sharing with a doctor. They are not a medical evaluation, and Snore Timeline does not diagnose any condition.

The Apple Watch app

Snore Timeline includes a companion Apple Watch app bundled with the iOS app, so there is nothing extra to buy or install. It lets you start and stop a recording from your wrist, so you do not have to reach for your iPhone once you are already in bed. The watch app is iOS only.

Beyond the controls, the watch gives you three places to see your night:

  • A live view while a session records, with your current heart rate, recent HRV, and progress toward your sleep goal.
  • A morning dashboard with your sleep score, recovery score, hypnogram, vitals, and snore activity.
  • Watch face widgets and complications that surface last night's score at a glance.

The dashboard opens on last night by default, and you can swipe back through the last 60 nights to revisit any morning, then swipe vertically through that night's full set of pages: score, recovery, vitals, stages, and weekly balance. A "jump to today" control brings you back to the most recent night in one tap.

The complications come in a few shapes. A Sleep Score widget is available in circular, corner, and rectangular styles and shows last night's score in a color gauge. The rectangular style pairs the score with your recovery status, like "6h 42m · Well Recovered". An inline widget reads "Score [value] · [duration]", for example "Score 84 · 6h 42m", or "Recording sleep" when a session is in progress. While a session is active, a Live Activity appears in your Apple Watch Smart Stack with a red REC indicator, a live timer, and either "Listening" or a running count of detected signals.

Live readings while you record

When a recording session is active and your Apple Watch is in use, the watch app shows live readings from your wrist. You see your current heart rate and recent HRV samples, with a rolling view of roughly the last 10 to 30 minutes of heart rate.

Snore Timeline Apple Watch live view during a recording, showing a REC indicator, an elapsed timer, current heart rate of 69 and HRV of 66 ms, and an episode count
The live view while a session records: timer, stop button, current heart rate, recent HRV, and a live episode count.

When a session starts, the app looks back a short while for your most recent heart rate so it can show a value right away instead of waiting for the next sensor reading. HRV readings are uncommon from Apple Watch, often just a handful across a whole night, so the app may show a recent baseline value when the session itself has not produced a new one yet.

The live view also tracks progress toward a full night. A progress bar fills as you sleep, with the time still to go below it, like "2h 32m to a full night", and a current heart rate and recent HRV beneath. Before the app detects that you have fallen asleep, it reads "Settling in" rather than a time.

The phone shows the same Live Activity in your iPhone's Dynamic Island and Lock Screen. Siri, Shortcuts & Widgets covers the Live Activity and widget options in more detail.

Nightly biometrics

If you wear your Apple Watch to bed and have Apple Health enabled, Snore Timeline reads six kinds of data your watch records overnight and shows them beside your snoring: sleep stages, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), respiratory rate, blood oxygen (SpO2), and wrist temperature. It combines these with its own audio analysis to give you broader context on the night. The watch is optional, and the app still works from audio alone if you do not have one.

On both the phone and the watch, these readings appear in a nightly biometrics card. The watch summarizes the headline numbers, and tapping through opens the detail screens:

  • Heart rate as your average, minimum, maximum, and a resting estimate for the night.
  • HRV as the average across the night's measurements (SDNN, in milliseconds).
  • Blood oxygen (SpO2) as the average and minimum saturation for the night.
  • Respiratory rate in breaths per minute.
  • Wrist temperature as a single nightly average, when your watch records it.
Snore Timeline Apple Watch vitals screen listing resting heart rate of 63 bpm at 4 bpm above average, HRV of 42 ms at 24 percent below average, breathing of 18 breaths per minute, and blood oxygen of 93 percent below 95 percent
The vitals screen lists each metric with a plain-language read against your average, like HRV sitting 24 percent below your norm.

On the phone's biometrics card, each metric carries a Good, Typical, Low, or Elevated rating and an inline sparkline so you can see how it moved across the night. These ratings are informational, never a diagnosis.

Snore Timeline Apple Watch resting heart rate detail showing 55 bpm rated Good, a trend line for the night ranging from 53 to 66 bpm, and a note that it sits 1 bpm below your average
The heart rate detail charts the night against your baseline, with a plain-language read like "1 bpm below your average."

Wrist temperature needs iOS 16 or later and an Apple Watch Series 8 or newer. On older watches that do not record it, the app leaves it out and everything else keeps working. The temperature value updates only when new readings arrive, so a partial sync will not replace a complete reading you already have.

Note

Your full sleep data may not be there the moment you wake up. Apple Watch usually finalizes its sleep staging 1 to 3 hours after you wake, so the complete breakdown can arrive later. Snore Timeline watches Apple Health in the background and syncs automatically once the watch pushes the finalized stages, even if you never open the Health app. To refresh sooner, use the Re-import history button in Settings under Apple Health.

Recovery score

Alongside the sleep score, the morning dashboard shows a recovery score: a read on how well your body recovered overnight, built from the same wrist vitals above. It appears as a five-segment charge bar with a one-word verdict, from Poor to Excellent, plus a short summary of what drove the night. Because it draws on HRV, resting heart rate, breathing rate, blood oxygen, wrist temperature, and time asleep, the recovery score needs a wearable feeding Apple Health; without one, the watch shows the sleep score on its own.

Snore Timeline Apple Watch recovery screen with a sleep score ring of 72, time asleep of 6h 6m labeled Recovered, a five-segment charge bar filled to a Good verdict, and a note that overnight vitals are at or above average
The recovery screen: a charge bar from Poor to Excellent, with each vital rated against your own baseline.

Each vital also gets its own detail page. Swipe in and you see that metric charted across the night as a sparkline, its average and range, a trend against your recent nights, and a plain-language reading of what the number means. The verdict bands and the full formula, including how a short night caps the score, live on the Sleep Score & Insights page. The recovery score is for personal insight, not a clinical readiness measure.

Sleep Bank

The Sleep Bank on the watch tracks how much sleep you have banked or borrowed over your recent week. It looks at your trailing 7 nights and compares each night against a goal of 7 hours of sleep. Nights above the goal build a surplus; nights below it build a deficit. The screen sums those differences into one balance so you can see, at a glance, whether the week left you ahead or behind.

Snore Timeline Apple Watch Sleep Bank showing a seven day bar chart against a 7 hour goal line, an average time asleep of 5 hours 1 minute, and a 13 hour 47 minute sleep deficit
The Sleep Bank: seven nightly bars against a 7-hour goal line, your average time asleep, and your running deficit or surplus.

The bar chart plots one bar per night across the week against the 7-hour goal line, and below it you see your average time asleep and the resulting Sleep Deficit or surplus. The app counts only nights that have sleep data, so a week with a few missed nights still reads correctly against the nights you did record.

For the duration of each night, the Sleep Bank prefers the sleep time Snore Timeline measured from your audio recording. On nights when you wore your watch but did not run a recording, or when you rely on a ring or band instead, it falls back to the sleep duration from Apple Health. That way the Sleep Bank stays complete whether you record every night, wear a wearable, or mix the two.

Apple Health integration

Apple Health is the bridge that lets Snore Timeline read your watch and write its own results back. To turn it on, open Settings in Snore Timeline, find the Health Integration section, tap the Apple Health toggle, and approve the permissions sheet that iOS shows. That single sheet covers everything the app reads and writes, with a checkbox for each data type, so you decide exactly what to allow in one place. You can turn the toggle off at any time, which disables all reading and writing at once, and you can fine-tune individual data types later in the iOS Health app's privacy settings.

The first time you enable it, the app pulls in the last 30 days of sleep data from Apple Health in one pass, so your recent nights are filled in right away.

What Snore Timeline reads (measured by your wearable): sleep stages, heart rate, HRV, respiratory rate, blood oxygen (SpO2), and wrist temperature on supported devices.

What Snore Timeline writes (all derived from your overnight audio, analyzed on-device): sleep analysis (time asleep and time in bed), sleep stages (light, deep, REM, and awake), and respiratory rate during sleep, stored in breaths per minute as the average across the night's samples. You can review this list in Settings under Apple Health. The app writes only its own analysis. It never writes data that came from other apps or devices, and it never overwrites readings from your Apple Watch or other wearables.

Tip

To bring in older history, tap Re-import history in Settings under Apple Health. This pulls every available night from all your sources, going back up to 2 years, and fills gaps without overwriting your existing data. When it finishes, the app shows a short summary, for example "imported 12 nights from Apple Watch, Apr 1 to May 30". If it finds no sleep data, it tells you that too.

Synced data can refine your sleep score. When Snore Timeline syncs from Apple Health, any night that also has a recording is re-analyzed so the app can update the score using the deep and REM sleep stages from your wearable, which measure those stages more accurately than audio analysis can. A night's score may improve on its own once your watch finishes finalizing its staging and that data reaches the app. Without a connected wearable, the app uses its own breathing- and movement-based estimates instead. The Sleep Stages page explains how those estimates work.

Snore Timeline Apple Watch morning dashboard with a sleep score ring of 72, time asleep of 6h 6m labeled Recovered, a five-segment recovery charge bar rated Good, and a note that overnight vitals are at or above your average
The morning dashboard leads with your sleep score in a ring, paired with your recovery status and time asleep.

The dashboard also shows a hypnogram for the night: a band that maps when you moved through awake, REM, light, and deep stages, with the time you spent in each. When a night has data from more than one source, Snore Timeline keeps each source's stage timeline separate so you can compare them rather than blending them into one.

Snore Timeline Apple Watch sleep stages screen showing a hypnogram from 1:25 am to 7:04 am with Awake 16 minutes 5 percent, REM 1 hour 41 minutes 30 percent, and Light 3 hours 16 minutes
The watch hypnogram maps the night's stages, with each stage's duration and share listed below.

Oura, Whoop, Garmin, and Ultrahuman

Apple Watch is not the only wearable Snore Timeline can read. Any device that writes its sleep data to Apple Health can feed the app, including the Oura Ring, Whoop, Garmin, and others. Snore Timeline reads only what those devices have written, and it never writes data on their behalf. If a night has data from more than one source, it keeps each source's sleep stage timeline separate so you can compare them side by side instead of merging them.

Privacy

If you turn on Apple Watch sync, Snore Timeline shares your recorded sleep data with the companion app on your own Apple Watch so you can view it there. This stays within Apple's own device-to-device sync and is never sent to Snore Timeline servers. Everything the app reads from other wearables flows through Apple Health, and only after you allow it. The Privacy Policy has the full picture.

Whether you wear a watch, a ring, a band, or nothing at all, the recording itself works the same. The wearable adds context on top of the audio the app already captures. To get the most out of the combination, the Get Deeper Sleep Data guide walks through connecting a wearable and reading the night that results.