Everyone wants and needs a good night’s sleep. But when it comes to using mobile apps as a sleep aid, it seems the consumers that do so the most tend to be younger, more affluent and eat better than consumers as a whole.

That’s the main conclusion from a new study of mobile apps as sleep aids and the people that use them from the NYU School of Medicine. The report also says the jury is still out on how effective sleep apps are in helping users nod off sooner and for longer or in preventing medical conditions that hinder sleep such as sleep apnea, a serious disorder that occurs when a person’s breathing is interrupted during sleep.

The research is based on results of a survey of a diverse group of 934 mobile phone users that use a health app to keep tabs on how long they sleep, what time they turn out the lights, whether they wake up in the middle of the night, and whether they snore, have trouble breathing, or change sleeping position.

The results reveal that that the average age of app users is 34. People with yearly incomes above $75,000 and those who already use a health app to remind them about taking their medications were also more likely to track their sleeping habits. Sleep app users typically had between 16 and 25 health apps on their smartphones, the survey says.

The survey asked about 24 health apps and found the most popular apps for sleep tracking include Fitbit at 10%, followed by Lose It at 3.5% and Apple Health at 2.6%.

“Sleep apps are very popular among a diverse group of Americans, and they have a lot of them to choose from,” says Rebecca Robbins, a postdoctoral research fellow in the NYU Langone Health  department of population health and the study’s lead researcher.

For the study, survey participants answered 36 detailed questions about their mobile phone and app use. More than half of survey participants had annual incomes of less than $50,000, and their average age was 47.

U.S. consumers spend a lot of time trying to get to sleep—and stay asleep. The average consumer only gets an average of 6.8 hours of sleep at night, down more than an hour from 1942 and below the seven hours to nine hours daily doctors recommend as part of a healthy lifestyle, according to WebMD.com.

Sleep aids, including mobile apps that track hours slept and sleep patterns, could address a real need. Between 50 million and 70 million consumers have a sleep disorder and 48% of consumers snore, says the American Sleep Association. 30% of consumers also suffer from insomnia, the association says.

The widespread use of mobile devices and apps to monitor daily habits may offer healthcare providers a way to more quickly diagnose and more effectively treat sleep problems, which are tied to increased rates of heart disease, cancer and diabetes, says the NYU School of Medicine.

But it’s too early to tell if the data being collected is of meaningful use to patients and their sleep doctors. “People are getting all this information on their sleep patterns and not really knowing how to interpret it, or even if it’s legitimate data,” Robbins says. “Ideally, mobile apps will serve as a key tool for monitoring patients between check-ups.”

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