For people living in care homes, a good night’s sleep shapes much of the day that follows, from mood to how steady they feel on their feet. Yet scheduled checks and handover notes capture moments in the night, and most of what happens between them goes unrecorded.
A new report, One Million and One Nights, analyses more than a million resident-nights of sleep data gathered contactlessly in care homes and hospitals since early 2024. It is published by Teton, an autonomous operating system that gives care teams a continuous understanding of resident wellbeing, and is free to download. Its central point is that sleep is a measurable early warning signal that most services cannot yet see.
The first finding concerns what a normal night looks like. Residents sleep just under eight hours a day on average, but across a three-week analysis daily totals spread fairly evenly between roughly four and eleven hours. For providers committed to person-centred care, the useful measure is each person’s own baseline, and the report sets out what those baselines look like across the dataset so services have a reference point for their own residents.
The second concerns safety. Residents whose sleep is irregular are 1.5 times more likely to fall. The analysis shows an association rather than a cause, but several broken nights give teams a practical reason to review mobility support, medication timing or the room environment with the resident and their family.
Aaron, a Registered Manager at Nightingale Hammerson, explains: “A resident who normally slept six or seven hours and woke once a night had started sleeping three or four hours and getting up four or five times. That can indicate a UTI, so we’d get them seen by the doctor.”
Several findings test assumptions common on night shifts. The report looks at how often residents spend the night in a chair, which happens less than many staff would expect and varies between countries. It also compares care homes with hospital wards, where patients sleep around an hour less despite spending four hours longer in bed, which matters for anyone supporting people after discharge.
Across the homes studied, residents slept nearly an hour longer each night after Teton was introduced, and slept 8% more efficiently, because staff could see who was settled and complete checks from the app instead of opening a door.
The full report covers sleep duration, sleep location, falls and the hospital comparison, along with the methodology. It is designed as a benchmark, so teams can ask how their own residents compare with more than a million nights of data.
Download your free copy of One Million and One Nights
Findings are based on production data from Teton-monitored care homes and hospitals. Teton’s system is not a medical device and does not diagnose or direct clinical response. It supports qualified care staff and does not replace their judgement.
