GoKawiilIn honor of World Sleep Day, I decided to embark on a sleep experiment. Earlier this month, I noticed my son's baby monitor, the Nanit Pro, started showing his sleep score every morning. This number tells you how well your child slept the night before on a scale from zero to 100. Sleep scores track how long it takes to fall asleep, sleep cycles, heart rate throughout the night and any disruptions that may have happened. It seemed fitting that one of our expert-recommended baby monitors would provide this information since many parents are often fixated on their infants' or toddlers' sleep habits.
I previously tested the Oura Ring, one of CNET's favorite smart rings, which tracks your health and sleep data and provides a sleep score based on data collected by its sensors on your finger (movement, temperature, heart rate and more). I started using the Oura Ring to hold myself more accountable for going to sleep on time -- even as a sleep-deprived new parent.
Seeing that my son has his own sleep score now made me think, "I bet he has a better sleep score than I do." I decided to conduct an experiment to see if I could prove my point by comparing our sleep scores.
To preface this, my 2.5-year-old has been going through a rough patch of sleep, which I'm blaming on a sleep regression (a temporary phase when babies and toddlers struggle with sleeping). Despite the disrupted sleep, he still seems better rested than I am on most days. It doesn't help that I'm a light sleeper, so any little sound (like my husband's snoring) or sudden temperature change wakes me up.
I recharged my Oura Ring after a temporary hiatus to put my theory to the test. The Oura Ring usually takes a month to get to know you and your habits, but for the sake of this experiment, I just needed my sleep scores to prove (or disprove) my point.
How the Nanit baby monitor tracks sleep
As previously mentioned, I use the Nanit Pro Baby Monitor to keep an eye on my son while he sleeps. According to Nanit, it first introduced the sleep score in December 2025, and this is the first AI-driven, science-backed sleep score designed to grow with your child and automatically adjust as they age. Nanit collects the sleep score using the same advanced computer vision technology sensors it has used for years to analyze sleep.
To come up with a sleep score, Nanit looks at four aspects of sleep: sleep duration (how long your child slept), sleep timing (your child's bedtime and wake-up time), sleep continuity (how smoothly your child sleeps) and parent visits (how often a guardian tends to the child).
How our sleep scores compared
After a week of reviewing his data, my son's sleep scores were higher than mine overall, as I predicted. He was hitting scores over 80, with the lowest being a 74. His highest was a 95, which I vividly remember was one of the times he slept through the night without getting up once. I also slept peacefully because I wasn't being awoken by cries at 3 a.m.
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