Australia's sleepiest city is Launceston.
With a population of 106,153 (ABS 2010 figures), the riverside city in northern Tasmania has had the best sleep quality for 2017 so far, according to data sought by Fairfax Media from Sleep Cycle, an alarm clock app on smartphones that enables people to track their sleep.
The worst city for sleep quality? Rockingham, the Western Australia city south-west of Perth.
Overall, Australians' mood when waking up ranked 83rd out of the 91 countries tracked, coming in at 57.42 per cent. Mood is tracked by users self-reporting their mood when they wake up.
Venezuela in South America had the best mood upon wake-up (73.69 per cent). Japan reported the worst mood, with users disclosing 48.03 per cent mood quality upon waking.
Meanwhile, in the battle of the sexes, men came out on top for waking up earlier and having the better mood at wake-up, while women went to bed earlier, spent the most time in bed and had the best sleep.
Sleep Cycle is a sleep tracker and alarm clock app that helps people improve their sleep and assists them in waking up easier, by making them rise at the appropriate time in their Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep cycle. It utilises a sound analysis technology that enables users to place their phone on their bedside table — instead of in their bed — to track their sleep. Its sound analysis technology then records sleep patterns through sound analysis.
"During sleep, our movements vary with each sleep phase," Maciek Drejak, chief executive officer of Sweden-based Northcube and founder of the Sleep Cycle alarm clock app, told Fairfax.
"Sleep Cycle alarm clock uses the phone's microphone to identify sleep phases by tracking movements in bed. SleepCycle will analyse your sleep, record its findings, and wake you during your lightest sleep phase, using a predefined 30-minute alarm window."
The data received by Fairfax includes an indication of sleep quality, with more "movements per hour" indicating a less restful slumber, as well as information on time spent in bed, sleep times and wake times, and the self-reported wake-up mood.
According to the data, Australia is among the five countries that spend the most time in bed. Australia also sits among the 10 that go to bed earliest (we rank sixth on average, going to bed at 11.21pm, with South Africa going to bed the earliest, at 11pm,and Georgia, a country at the intersection of Europe and Asia, going to bed the latest at 1.12am).
Australians have so far spent more time in bed in 2017, compared to same period in 2016. Australians have gone to bed earlier this year too, compared to the same period last year.
And we have been waking up earlier this year, compared to same period last year.
This year's data covers includes January 1 until September 21. The demographic is males and females aged 18-55, with a minimum of 250 users per country or Australian city.
For context, Sleep Cycle's alarm clock app uses an algorithm that knows over 1 terabytes of different sounds and filters out all sounds that are not from the users' movements in bed. Sounds that are filtered out include cars passing by, fans, air conditioner units, wind through open windows, curtains fluttering, dogs barking, babies crying, conversations, and footsteps, among others.
It is also optimised for partners sharing beds. It does this by enabling the couple's two devices to communicate with each other via Wi-Fi to determine where the sound is coming from, before adding it to the sleep analysis of the specific user moving.
In addition to looking for the specific sound-fingerprint of bed sheets moving, several other filters are deployed. It can detect and filter rhythmic, reoccurring sounds such as breathing and snoring, as well as detect and filter certain specific sounds that are problematic for the fingerprinting system, for example breathing apparatus used by people with sleep apnoea.
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