How to Record Acoustic Terror with Smart Watch

On October 23, 2025, in Kyiv, I first recorded acoustic terror using a smart watch. I will write in detail how you can do it and why you should.

Device and software.

I have a Samsung Smart Watch 4, which records sleep indicators using the Samsung Health app. There is a heart rate graph during sleep, superimposed on hours. This is my sleep graph on the night of October 21-22, 2025.

The period without a pulse after 01:16 indicates that I woke up from a very loud sound of an explosion on the left bank of Kyiv, approximately 10 kilometers from me. From open sources, I later learned that it was probably the sound of a Russian missile being shot down.

Further, around 05:00 on the graph, there is similar data. I woke up from air defense shots at Russian drones, it was loud, but also kilometers away from me.

Impact on sleep.

I fell asleep after both loud impacts. But in the morning, I compared another sleep indicator with typical ones.

The smart watch measures the duration of different sleep phases, and one of them – rapid eye movement or REM sleep – was approximately half of my typical duration.

Here you can see two sleep measurements for me on the day of the shelling of Kyiv and two days before that, on a night in Kharkiv without shelling.

You can read here what the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep phase is.

In short, the decrease of the duration of this sleep phase may increase anxiety, irritability, hallucinations, difficulty concentrating, and worsen memory.

Why record this?

This measurement method will record insomnia, awakenings, and changes in sleep phases. It will record changes in overall sleep quality even in those who are far from the impact site and were not affected by it in any visible way, not even experiencing an acute stress reaction.

Journaling such impacts and comparing them with personal medical history and the chronology of enemy attacks will provide a comprehensive picture of the effects of acoustic terror on people.

Thus, an evidentiary base can be prepared to prove the crime of mass terror committed by the Russian military.

If you have read this, then I have a question – are there any volunteers here who live in locations where even distant shelling is often heard and have smart watches and are ready to conduct such monitoring personally? Then write to me at pani@maidan.org.ua .

I don’t promise you anything except focused joint observation with me, which could potentially create a new forensic methodology.

Nataliya Zubar, Chair of the Maidan Monitoring Information Centre