![]() Just paying attention to trends and patterns in your sleep data may point to underlying sleep issues, such as sleep apnea. But if you aren’t sleeping well, “it is possible that sleep tracking may be the first step to engaging in helpful ways to optimize sleep,” he adds. So if you wake up generally feeling refreshed, you probably don’t need a sleep tracker to give you any more information. “People who sleep well don't think about it,” says Peters. These devices are merely meant to provide you with information that might inform your habits and help you spot problems. How Your Fitness Tracker Can Help You Sleep Better.Getting so caught up in the quest for “perfect” sleep can actually further disrupt your shuteye scientists have deemed this “ orthosomnia” (it’s not an official medical diagnosis, but, in the age of ubiquitous data, it’s another way metrics mess with your head). “Insights may prompt reduced intake of caffeine or alcohol late in the day, daytime exercise or a cooler bedroom to enhance deep sleep, or prolonged wakefulness may be eliminated by reducing the time in bed,” he adds.įor now, while these findings indicate that many sleep-tracking devices do demonstrate promising performance for tracking sleep and wake, don’t start obsessing over your sleep data. Schedule bedtimes to help meet your sleep goals and analyze your sleep trends over 14 days.Įventually, these devices might provide actionable advice that can help you change your behavior to optimize your sleep, says Brandon Peters-Mathews, M.D., a sleep-medicine doctor at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle and the author of Sleep Through Insomnia. (For what it’s worth, most of the devices in both of these studies have since been replaced by new versions that likely have even more sophisticated sleep tracking sensors in them.) That’s not to say they won’t be capable of better discriminating between sleep stages or providing even more data as the algorithms used by the devices evolve. However, Fitbit and Oura were deemed the most accurate out of eight commercial brands that were tested. The trackers tested also weren’t accurate in quantifying sleep stages (REM, non-REM). In fact, a 2021 study published in the journal Nature and Science of Sleep found that most wearable sleep tracking devices either overestimated or underestimated sleep metrics such as total sleep time, total wake time, and sleep efficiency. “These devices really shouldn’t be looked at for sleep staging at this point,” Chinoy adds. Translation: There’s only about a 50-percent chance your data is accurate. But “in terms of tracking light, deep, and REM sleep, basically all of the devices performed at only a medium level of accuracy,” says Chinoy. ![]() Most new wearables also track the sleep stages you cycle through throughout the night. They also tended to perform worse on nights with poorer or disrupted sleep, meaning your data in the morning may say you had a good night’s sleep, even if you were tossing and turning throughout, says Chinoy. The study authors hypothesized that Garmins’ relatively higher threshold for wake and lower threshold for sleep is what resulted in their poor performance. In general, the devices tended to overestimate sleep and underestimate wake. More Sleep Could Make You Less Injury-Prone.That’s likely because, if you’re not moving and your heart rate is low, the devices-which typically use an accelerometer to detect movement and a light-based sensor to detect heart rate-have a harder time determining whether you’re actually awake or asleep. “However, if you’re in bed trying to sleep but still awake, they’ll only perform at a medium level of accuracy.” ![]() What that really means is “if you’re asleep, most these devices are going to correctly determine-with 90 to 95 percent accuracy-that you are indeed asleep,” says the Sleep study author Evan Chinoy, a sleep research scientist at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, CA. The Apple Watch Series 3 and Garmin Vivosmart 4 fell at the other end of the spectrum. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪdditional research published in the Nature & Science of Sleep Journal in October 2020 found that the Fitbit Ionic and the Oura Smart Ring possessed the lowest degrees of error in sleep tracking compared to an electroencephalography (EEG)-based device as well as other wrist-based trackers, including the Beddit Sleep Monitor 3.0, Fatigue Science Readiband, Polar A370, and WHOOP Strap 2.0.
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