Health App Stopped Tracking Sleep Data

SOLVED

Same issue with new iPhone 16 with iOS 18. I noticed my iPad has all my health data on it, so After trying everything I found on line to no avail I finally decided to go for it, and IT worked.

On your iPhone:

Go to settings.

Click on your account name at the top.

Click on iCloud.

Click on “see all” under the Saved To Cloud section.

Click on Health.

Turn off the “ Sync this iPhone “ toggle

EXIT out and shut down your iPhone and your Apple Watch.

wait 10 seconds then turn iPhone back on.

go to the same section and toggle the “Sync this iPhone” to On.

it takes about 15 minutes to download your health data from the cloud.

turn on your Apple watch now if you have.

after it’s done downloading, check your data. It should all be there. At least it worked for moi. Aloha🤙🏼

Spoke to Apple Customer Service. Did a number of things - including signing out and in to iCloud on the new phone, shutting down phone, shutting down watch, and then -- setting an alarm on the phone (not the watch) for the next morning. She said that it 'triggers' something. Well it did, and it worked. I am told I no longer need the alarm and it will keep working. I will know tomorrow if that is true, but glad to have my sleep data back since 10/17 (by the way, it did not have or return the days in between, but did start tracking last night).

@SONAR3

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried this but it didn't work. A call to Apple Support finally solved it. It involved unpairing the watch and re-pairing it.

One can buy another sleep tracker watch, and use that app to track one’s sleep. I know it’s another expense, and irritating. Huawei 🤔😦 do a $50 one, and there are second hand Samsungs around for less than that

I'm not sure about the physiology involved, but measuring sleep stages does involve inferring them from body movements, among other things. Accordingly, it's quite likely that having an Apple Watch ON YOUR WRIST while sleeping makes the estimates much more accurate. Frankly, I have NO idea how an iPhone sitting in its charger can tell whether or not you're even asleep, let alone in what stage.

However, I CAN tell you what works for me. At least a half hour before I retire for the night, I'll put my watch on my charger, then put it back on my wrist just before going to sleep. For this to work, I must ALSO manually "start" the watchOS "Sleep" app ON THE WATCH. If I don't, the iPhone might guess WHEN I was sleeping, but not make ANY attempt to assess in what stage of sleep, and those estimates are often dramatically incorrect. So, in the end I think Apple is just trying to give users the most accurate data available FROM the pairing. I DON'T know, however, why it's necessary for me to take that extra step of "opening" the app on the watch just before I go to sleep.

AppleCreditNOTE wrote:

They want you to buy the Apple watch. Pathetic.

No, they "want" to provide you the most accurate data possible. If you're TRULY interested in monitoring the stages of sleep, You'll be in a sleep lab, with sensors on your scalp (for tracking your EEG), on your eyelids (for monitoring "REM" sleep, on your chest (for tracking respiratory and heart rates, and on your arms and legs (for tracking movements). There is NO way a phone sitting next to you or even worse, on a charger at your bedside, can come anywhere NEAR accuracy in what it records. The watch at least can tell when you're moving, tell (as long as you have a watch that is excluded from the lawsuit that prevents the watch from reporting your SaO2), your breathing efficiency, and make other inferences that it gathers from that data. So, you can get crude data from a phone alone, better data from the phone as the repository of data recorded by the watch. Go ahead and choose, but the choice Apple has made is in the interest of accuracy, not just profit!

I asked once but no one responded. Perhaps there's a Support article that discusses this. What I've learned from all posts in this thread is limited to three observations:

1. Apple used to record and report "sleep" data on the iPhone, apparently without the phone in any way attached to one's body.
2. Apple removed that "ability" as part of a new iOS release
3. Some people have reported success in restoring the phone's "ability" to track sleep the way it used to by temporarily suspending synching between the phone and the watch and instead temporarily sending it to their iPad.

There's been essentially NO discussion in this topic on just HOW an iPhone can record sleep without a physical attachment to one's body, nor has there been any discussion regarding whether the reason Apple stopped "reporting" such data relates to much better information becoming available because the watch can record movement, pulse rate, and other physiological data because of its physical connection to the body.

Again, I've not searched Apple's support pages to learn just HOW Apple infers sleep stage information from sensors on the watch vs. sensors on the phone. For example, I'm ignorant of just HOW either device infers sleep stages that in medical practice require EEG data and eye movement data. But it's at least it's possible that Apple decided it makes no sense to stop reporting "data" that makes too frequently incorrect inferences about sleep stages (or even if one is asleep at all) with the recording/reporting device (the phone) physically separated from the body and NO sensor attached to the body. If someone knows, I'd be VERY interested.

Ive posted teice now what i believe is the reason Apple stopped supporting sleep “tracking” from the phone—a fundamental inferiority of the data obtainable from a device not physically attached to the body. The watch provides both movement (from its accelerometer) and positional (from its gyroscopic sensor), which the IPhone simply cannot do reliably even while sitting on a mattress next to a sleeping user. I’m happy to be informed otherwise, but such assertions would need to be accomanied by vetted snd varified data. Even from the watch the algorithmic inferences are far from infallible (for example, my watch has claimed i was sleeping while i was not even bed.

I have not heard anything about a fix yet. I now keep track of my sleep and manually enter it into the health app.

I’m having the exact same problem. It stopped tracking as soon as I changed phones, though. I recently got a new iPhone 16.

I’ve had a look through all the Sleep and Health setting sections and can’t figure out why it has stopped tracking. I’m still using the sleep schedule functions as normal, and still not sleeping with Apple Watch on. So odd.

Has a fix been determined on what needs to be done to have your hours of sleep tracked using your Health app on your phone? Since I upgraded to IOS 18, no sleep data has been captured. I updated on 10/10.

Me too.

Why in the world doesn’t Apple provide any kind of support on this forum? Do they even know this exists? So many times I’ve come here to research a problem and found no answers. Mostly it’s “reinstall the os”. The next reply is it didn’t help. That’s the end of the discussion.

My understanding is that the iPhone used to track your sleep if you didn’t have an Apple Watch, but that feature was removed in iOS 18. So the only way to do any sort of sleep tracking is to get an Apple Watch.

Remember when Apple did things to please customers instead of pleasing stockholders (which I am one)?

I don’t want anything on my wrist so no sale here.

Or maybe tracking sleep with the iPhone on the bed is poor quality compared to the Apple Watch on your wrist. Understood that "you" don't want to wear a watch -- sounds like "Main Character Syndrome" to me.

Good job SONAR Just had an update a couple of days ago and NO tracking for 2 days on the phone. Good on the watch but didnt talk to the phone. Followed your suggestions and BAM works great. I didnt even know how to shut off my watch so learned a couple of things............thanks