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This is almost always battery settings: your phone put SleepStop, or the app that came with your watch, to sleep in the background - so the watch's signal never reached your phone. It's the single most common issue. One-time setup on your phone:

• Allow SleepStop to keep running in the background - look for battery in its app settings and pick the option that does not restrict it.
• Do the same for the app that came with your watch (Garmin Connect, for Garmin watches) - it passes the signal on, so if your phone pauses it, nothing reaches SleepStop.
• If your phone has a setting that puts unused apps to sleep, turn it off for both of them.
• Keep Bluetooth on and Garmin Connect running, and open SleepStop on the watch to check it says Armed.

The tell-tale sign is that only the watch half is dead: the phone app looks perfectly healthy - it says it is ready and waiting for your watch - but night after night nothing ever arrives from the watch, and the sound is never stopped. It looks as though the watch app is broken. It usually is not.

The app that relays the signal (Garmin Connect, for Garmin watches) can fail to pick up a newly installed SleepStop until it is restarted. Fix it once:

• In your phone's settings, open the list of apps, find Garmin Connect and choose Force stop.
• Back in SleepStop, open Settings and, under What detects you're asleep, switch to Phone and then back to Smartwatch. That rebuilds the connection.
• Open the SleepStop app on your watch once, so it registers itself again.

There is no instant confirmation to look for - the next night is the test. You should only ever need to do this once, right after installing.

If the sound stops while you are still awake, tap "I was awake - resume" on the notification SleepStop leaves behind. Your audio picks up again from where it was cut off, and SleepStop goes straight back to watching instead of standing down until morning. Without a watch the same tap also starts SleepStop again: the stillness check or the timer runs once more, for at most 15 minutes. The offer stays up for about ten minutes, then disappears on its own.

Detection is tuned to your own resting heart rate, and it keeps improving as it sees more real nights. The most useful thing you can send is your real sleep time versus the time SleepStop stopped the sound, shown on the History screen - and, if you use a watch, a photo of the Night graph from the watch app's menu. That comparison is what sharpens detection most.

Stats counts one point per night, and only nights where SleepStop stopped something that was actually playing. A stop that silenced nothing still shows up in History, but it isn't an answer to "what do you fall asleep to", so it doesn't count here. Keep SleepStop running at bedtime with your audio on, and the charts fill in from the first real night.

What you'll see is your listening habit - the time you usually drift off, how much it swings, and which apps you fall asleep to. It is built from the moments your audio was stopped, not from a sleep tracker, so it says nothing about how well you slept.

1. Get SleepStop on Google Play. Running on the phone alone works straight away.
2. With a Garmin watch: install the Connect IQ app on your phone if you don't have it yet, then get the SleepStop watch app - or search for SleepStop in Connect IQ.
3. Open SleepStop on the watch once. After that it runs in the background, and the phone app's setup guide walks you through the rest.

Just an Android phone, really - that's the only must-have. SleepStop can run on its own, sensing when you go still or simply counting down a timer you set.

• Running on the phone alone? Put the phone on the mattress near you, not on a nightstand - that's how it can actually feel you go still. (A timer doesn't care where the phone is.)
• Want sharper detection? Pair a Garmin watch. SleepStop works with most Garmin models; it was developed and tested on an epix Pro (Gen 2) and a fenix 7. If your watch isn't supported, the Connect IQ Store simply won't offer SleepStop for it - so you don't have to check a list.
• With a watch, you'll also need Garmin Connect installed and signed in, with the watch paired.