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    Should I buy a Fitbit for sleep tracking?

    • My husband gave me a Beddit sleep tracker for Christmas. He discovered it in an Apple store. It has an electronic strip that lays under the sheet but on top of the mattress to detect things like heart rate and motion of the mattress, at least I think it can sense motion.

      It seemed like a good idea but in reality all I seem to get is my heart rate and I don’t know what can be gleaned from that. It tells me how many hours of sleep I supposedly got but I know I was laying in bed awake for some of the time it said I was asleep.

      One problem is my husband and our big dog share the bed. The dog sometimes snores and he thrashes around right next to me. My husband does that further away.

      I have friends who say Fitbits are better and they tell you when you are in REM sleep. My husband says I should try his Apple Watch before I go spend $140 on a Fitbit.

      Any advice?

    • My iPhone X is not a great macro camera in only my right hand, but it did capture the heartbeat display from last night and this morning as displayed below

      I do like seeing the heartbeat graph in the morning, and I find that it corresponds well with my own estimation of how well I slept the previous night. It will also vary much more, if I have been awake during the night for any reason. You can see the steep rise in my heart rate when I woke up about 7 am this morning.

      If my heart rate goes down and stays in the low 50's most of the night ( 51-54 say ) I am almost certain to have rested very well. When I travel or sleep at altitude, or am unusually tired, my heart rate tends to hover nearer 57-58 or higher, during the night, and I know I didn't really sleep that great. I can see by my heart rate variation sometimes, if I've been dreaming too.

      I can also see that my heart rate has risen before I am awake - even if i am awakened by an alarm, and I DO like the vibrating alarm of my iWatch a lot better than typical auditory alarms - like an iPhone or an iPad. So does my sopouse. 😄

      It is not a sleep lab, but it is reassuring that it agrees pretty much with my own internal assessment. Its not a reason to buy an iWatch, but I like it. I also like that it can control the volume levels on headphones or my indash car system too.

    • I would suggest looking into Garmin's product line as well. Like Apple watches, they are a bit pricier than Fitbit, but they also offer a lot more functionality and health tracking.

      I recently upgraded to Fenix 6X with a built-in optical heart rate sensor. I've been holding out from upgrading from my Fenix 3 because every year, optical sensors getting better and closer to chest strap heart rate, which is the gold standard for accuracy. The waiting game has paid off, and the latest Garmin optical sensors are much more accurate. 

      I think that one-trick pony kind of fitness trackers get old fast. For me to wear a watch all night, I better get a lot of accurate data, tracked over months with a personalized, insightful suggestion on how to improve my sleep. But once I'm up, having a watch that keeps on tracking my heart rate all day long also shows stress related activities that impact sleep. So when looking at the data over 24 hours rather than just the sleeping portion, one can make more informed guesses on causes of restless nights.

    • I like the Apple Watch for sleep tracking. I used to have a basic Fitbit style watch which was ok. But I like the Apple Watch because it tracks all of my fitness activities.

    • Hi Sharon!! Great to see you here. What is that software you're using on your Apple Watch? It looks cool. There seem to be a ton of sleep apps in the App Store.

    • I have been a user of various personal trackers for years. Went through a few Fitbits, owned a BASIS watch before they were acquired by Intel and promptly scrapped, etc. For the moment I settled with the cheapest Garmin Forerunner, the 235. My wife wears Nokia/Withings (though it's just Withings now) SteelCharge watch and is quite happy with it, and their newer ScanWatch looks like a great product when it comes out in Q2 2020.

      My personal requirements are that I don't have to charge the thing daily (thus, no Wear OS watches for me, even though I fancy the Fossil Sport ones going for cheap now), and that it has a user-removable/swappable bracelet, because for whatever reason I seem to wear those out (plus in hot climates you want to be able to maybe swap between steel/leather/silicon sometimes).

      Importantly, it's not just what gimmicks a particular device has, but what you can do with the data. Most manufacturers try to lock you into their ecosystem (especially Garmin), and even if not, the amount and character of insights you can get from their platforms/apps is usually limited. Just a bit more than a year ago, I have discovered a small Australian startup called exist.io (disclosure: link is a referral, posting it this way is that if you decide to try it out, you'd get 2 months free trial instead of just one; not that they are expensive at $6 monthly, but still, it's a recurring subscription; not otherwise affiliated, just a happy customer) which added a lot of value to my "quantified self" efforts, and seems to be a kind of small, very transparent and genuine outfit that I like in general, besides the functionality. It allows you to assemble a number of data sources including most of trackers, and give you a very nice set of visualisations to help you with insights. They also try to show you trends and correlations (especially if you use their features to tag/annotate your day regularly, which I find very useful), but not insistently and they don't sell your data to anyone. On topic for this conversation, here's my sleep tracking page there as an example (the two visible correlations are pretty mundane, but there's more of them below which I cut for personal reasons :) and some of them are useful and not always obvious; as usual, if you take time to rate the correlations, they improve faster) - https://prnt.sc/qngozi

      In comparison, this a daily sleep details screen from Garmin's own Connect app/website, for a weekday->weekend night - https://prnt.sc/qngwsr

      All manufacturers have their own quirks and foci, e.g. Garmin is heavily sports/activity oriented, while Withings focuses on generic health approach.

    • Like Apple watches, they are a bit pricier than Fitbit

      I didn't know Garmin made watches like these. They are pricey but now I am interested. I will investigate.

    • The problems with all of them I’ve seen in this conversation is (1) they are all inferring sleep stages by heart rate, movement, snoring, etc., but they don’t actually measure brain waves to know for sure; (2) they give data but don’t actually help you sleep.

      That’s why I think these sleep headbands are so interesting: they do both. You can see and try them at your local Best Buy.

      Does a Sleep Headband Really Improve Sleep? A Look at the ScienceA sleep headband is a relatively new device that claims to deepen and improve the quality of your sleep. Here's the science behind how they work.www.bulletproof.com

    • I wonder how comfortable these are to sleep with. Or if, ironically, some people sleep worse because of wearing one.

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