The Most Measured Hours of Your Life Are Still the Least Protected

You can buy a ring that tells you how you slept before you've even had your coffee. It will show you how long you slept, how much of it was deep, how often you stirred, and a single readiness number that determines whether you train hard today or take it easy. Tens of millions of people now wear something to bed for exactly this reason. Global smart-ring shipments were roughly 1.8 million in 2024 and were forecast to reach just over 4 million in 2025 (Omdia, “Empowering the Health and Fitness Ecosystem with Smart Rings,” November 2025).¹

Add wrist wearables, and consumer sleep tracking is a multi-billion-dollar market.

How remarkable that the most private third of life is measurable? We can see sleep stages, sleep efficiency, heart-rate variability, resting heart rate, and recovery. For a long stretch of human history, sleep was simply gone — eight hours you surrendered and never got a report on. Now you have the data.

Here is the part worth sitting with: for people who take insulin, those same measured hours are the least protected of their lives.

What the wearable sees, and what it doesn't

A sleep tracker is a wellness device, not a diagnostic one. It estimates. It infers stages from movement, heart rate, and temperature, and it does a useful job of telling you that last night was rough. What it doesn’t do is tell you why or do anything to counteract what may have made it rough.

For someone on insulin, the reason a night falls apart is often invisible to the ring, yet obvious to the body. Glucose drifts low at 2 a.m., and the nervous system kicks in to defend blood glucose levels. Glucose runs high, and rest loses depth. The ring records the wreckage - more time awake, fragmented stages, a heart rate that won't settle - and reports it back in the morning as a low score.

Accurate. Also incomplete.

A quarter of insulin users are already tracking this

This is not a fringe behavior among people with diabetes. In our 2026 patient research, roughly one in four insulin users already monitors their sleep with a wearable (DQ&A PWD Segmentation and JTBD Report, January 5, 2026, Slide 57, n=583). And roughly one in five people with diabetes report moderate or severe sleep disturbance.

Put those two facts next to each other: a large group of insulin users has already decided that their sleep is worth measuring. So, they wear the ring. They check the score. And not one data point in that score changes the overnight glucose that may be degrading it. The measurement is real. The protection is missing.

Measurement was the easy part

It is worth being honest about the order in which things happened.

Measurement came first because it’s easier. A sensor can watch, and watching is a solved problem. Acting overnight — safely, automatically, in the one window where a person cannot manage their own glucose because they are asleep — is the hard problem.

Because people who use pens are so efficient during the day, the industry assumed they were fine. No one stopped to examine the only time they can’t be vigilant: at night, when they close their eyes.

This is the gap sleep-only automation is built to close: automated insulin delivery for pen users that works while you sleep and steps back when you’re awake. A tracker reports the night. The category we're building is meant to act in it. Whether that produces a better number on the ring is a hypothesis we have to earn with evidence, not a claim we get to make.

But the shape of the problem is clear: we have spent a decade learning to see these hours, now we need to protect them.

Nights protected. Days yours.

Sources

1. dQ&A, PWD Survey Results: Luna Patient Segmentation & Jobs To Be Done, January 2026 (fieldwork 13–19 December 2025), slide 57; n=583 US adults on insulin and CGM. Device-share figures are omitted pending confirmation of their survey base.