Have you ever wondered how your sleep patterns would look as a work of art? This app from the French hotel chain Ibis lets you visualize your in-bed movements.

Jet lag, one of those modern afflictions that wouldn't be possible without technology, remains one of the main perils of international travel. But now a group of researchers have come up with what may be the best solution in the fight to reset your internal sleep clock in the age of the global citizen.

If you toss and turn at night, a host of gadgets are eager to help you get some quality shut eye. As with health-tracking technology, it's ultimately up to you to be proactive and fix the issues that keep you up. Sleep monitors collect a wealth of information when you snooze — brain waves, motion, heartbeat, breathing, etc. — and ideally provide an online component that compiles this data into beautiful charts to help you understand your habits over time. While informative, sleep analytics can't tell the whole story. Instead, it's up to the sleeper to fill in the gaps. To fully take advantage of these technologies, it's recommended that you log additional information in sleep journals (often provided by apps or Web dashboards), noting how you felt upon waking and chronicling factors that might have contributed to poor sleep, such as alcohol, coffee, temperature, bright lights, big meals, etc. This can help you see correlations between lifestyle/environment and body. Of course, not all sleep gadgets were made equal. Let's take a look at nine popular ones on the market and what they offer.

Sleeping is generally considered to be an absolute waste of time. It's a necessity, yes, but you can't actually do anything while asleep. A new study seems to show that it may be possible for humans to learn things while unconscious, potentially making sleep useful for once.