Please read this if you use a fitness tracker to track your sleep.
A lot of us use a fitness tracker to track our sleep using devices such as the Apple Watch, Fitbit and Garmin fitness tracker. Most of the time these trackers are great in helping us reach our fitness goals and track things like BPM. However, using them to track sleep gets a little cloudy, here’s why.
If you listen to each individual company, their own fitness tracker is ‘the best’ at tracking sleep. The problem is, is that there are about 6 industry leaders all claiming their fitness tracker has the best sleep tracking capabilities. Can you see the issue there? You can go online and see some good info and some not so good info surrounding this.
So, I thought I would take it upon myself to see how accurate they are, after all, I am a Fitbit user. I’ve acquired a Garmin and a Fitbit to see just how the data from these two devices crosses over. Without going into too much detail and showing you various graphs and sleep data from these devices, I’ll cut straight to the point.
Both devices show a completely different sleep. One night I can score high on Fitbit for sleep and the same night Garmin scores me very low and vice versa. Things like deep sleep, REM sleep and time awake is completely and utterly out of sync between the two trackers. This wasn’t just one night, I’ve actually worn these devices for over a month now and the data is still way, way out –others who have done similar tests have had the same outcome too.
My best advice to you if you are checking these devices to see just how good or bad you slept is to not. Just take it off, or stop checking it, the technology just isn’t there yet.
Instead, do everything you can do to limit a poor night of sleep. Using Deep Sleep in conjunction with things like no caffeine after 4pm (earlier the better), limiting artificial light an hour before bed (phone, TV) and getting a good amount of exercise early in the day to name but just a few (for more tips and tricks please browse our social media channels and website blogs-there’s lots of helpful information).
If you yourself are one of those people who wakes up and immediately check the tracker to see how you’ve slept, I really hope this has shed a little light on the inconsistencies of these trackers for you.