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Comment by kodisha | Hacker News Reader

Semi related iWatch Rant - if you think running data is bad, try tracking your sleep.

It just doesn't work.

- Sleep for 3h - wake up for 1, sleep for 5 more: records 3h only.

- (being a parent of a small baby) do not sleep at all during the night, sleep 4+3 hours during the day: 0 hours recorded

- sleep trough the night but wake up every 90-100 minutes (baby again): 0 hours recorded

Damn, this is a $500+ device, and it cant even get basic sleep data correctly. Also, it takes anywhere from 1min to couple of hours for data to appear in the Health app.

OTOH my wife has ~3 year old Huawei Fit watch, which was about $120, and that thing records every 10-15min or longer nap. Without a mistake.

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As someone who went through the same process, including using a Huawei watch previously, I encourage you to try Autosleep. It has much better sleep detection magic and exposes a few knobs that enable you to fine-tune the autodetection and also manually correct the sleep records in sensible ways.

It integrates with Health, so it has the bonus of tidying up the sleep data all across the board.

Not related to the developer in any way, just a very happy user.

OMG thanks!

Installing it right away!

Autosleep is great. I've had none of the issues the OP mentions and I've used Autosleep since I first got my watch.

+1 for AutoSleep.

I've been using it since before WatchOS 7 introduced sleep tracking, and it's scarily accurate even at tracking when I doze off for a short while in bed.

+1 for AutoSleep, it’s amazing abs basically perfect even with intermittent or broken sleep.

Doesn't seem to be needed since the OP already got the message, but just in case...yet another +1 for AutoSleep, which I use religiously. Great design, just complex enough to give you lots of detailed info, but still simple enough to be easy to parse and use the data. And although I'm asleep when it's in use, near as I can tell, it does a great job of tracking my sleep, including fitful periods and naps. And its percentage "sleep quality" rating seems to correlate very well with my own impression of how good my sleep was and how refreshed I am.

One really valuable thing it has highlighted for me is how much of a negative impact alcohol has on my sleep quality. Very eye-opening. And I would have never known this without AutoSleep.

For anyone interested in heart rate accuracy and sleep tracking accuracy I will recommend to check The Quantified Scientist reviews.
From his latest reviews of the new apple watches, heart rate is pretty much on par with chest strap and sleep tracking is also far better than anything he tested.

Apple Watch : Scientific Sleep Test - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPqtfC70QTU

Second this; I found it particularly interesting that even the best device (AW) was a bit worse than I would have expected, which means my issues with my own device (Garmin) make a lot more sense.

This was great. Thanks for sharing.

Regarding sleep: the most important reason why these devices suck for tracking sleep is that you have to recharge them every 24h. That's either not being able to use them during the day for some period or do overnight charging.

It might be hard to imagine, but your charging habits will change.

I wear my watch 23/7. It charges in the morning when I’m in the shower.

Only after an extra sporty day with a lot of sports tracking will I need to let it charge an extra 30 minutes or so extra during that day.

I recharged my Pebbles while I was in the shower, since they usually took less than 15 minutes to top up after ~24 hours of usage. I've found my Apple Watch (it is an older model, though) to need too much time to recharge, however, so rather than building a different habit around it I recharge it overnight.

I tried for years, didn't work for me (Apple Watch 2). I mow have a Garmin Fenix 7 which lasts 18 days without recharge, buy has much more limited features (which is fine for me).

I suspect that's why AW sleep tracking isn't improved well as GP said.

You probably want to checkout Sleep++ or Autosleep for sleep tracking. The third-party apps go beyond the basic, built-in feature.

The Huawei Fit performed significantly worse compared to the Apple Watch in this sleep test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPqtfC70QTU

As the other poster suggested, AutoSleep is amazing.

I've found if my watch is too loose it won't record sleep well.

It's also a known problem that Apple watches "backup" bugs (which I've experienced twice now). If the problem still continues, I'd recommend you fully unpair/reset your watch and setup it up as a new watch (do not restore from backup).

I used Garmin Fenix 5 for sleep tracking and it has similar issues. In fact, if I sleep during the day, it doesn’t recognise it as a sleep! I checked the garmin support forums and some other users reported the same thing but garmin didn’t care to fix.

Most sleep trackers have similar issues. For example, most won't detect biphasic or polyphasic sleep correctly - it's assumed that sleep happens in one unbroken period once per day. If you get up in the middle of the night for a snack and then go back to sleep, it's a coin flip whether it will be detected as the "end" of sleep, or as a long "awake" period in the middle.

When I hit the snooze button on my phone and go back to sleep for another hour, both my Garmin and Oura are inconsistent whether that extra hour counts as sleep or not.

Garmin's even weirder than most as it asks you for your normal sleep hours when setting up the watch, which suggests that it's not as smart as it should be.

Garmin, to its credit, is slowly moving away from pure sleep tracking and using other metrics like HRV, stress, and yesterday's activity levels to calculate readiness for today's workout.

Ditch the built-in sleep tracking and use Autosleep.

Sleep tracking always seemed like nonsense to me. You either know you are getting restful sleep or know you are not, and if you are not time is probably better spent taking a proactive approach to establishing healthier lifestyle habits that will lead to more restful sleep. How much is it worth really, to wake up and know exactly how much time you were tossing around not getting rest? I’d imagine you would feel it, statistics or not.

It's very useful information when you are never rested and constantly are trying to tweak variables to observe the impacts to your sleep. I've long since stopped relying on trackers, however, as nothing seemed to display any accuracy whatsoever. I manually record my perception of sleep every night.

I had an Oura ring for a while and found it to be quite accurate. Using it, I found myself adjusting my routine to prioritize sleep.

> You either know you are getting restful sleep or know you are not...I’d imagine you would feel it, statistics or not.

How I feel doesn't always correlate with good sleep. It's just one variable. Knowing whether my sleep is good lets me know that I should be looking at other problems.

Or, in some cases, I am in bed for eight hours, but the quality of my sleep by the numbers is bad. It's not that I'm not getting enough sleep, it's that something is affecting my sleep. Spicy food too late in the evening? Too much caffeine? Not enough hydration throughout the day? It's hard to be mindful of the things that make my sleep worse unless I actually know when my sleep wasn't great.

> You either know you are getting restful sleep or know you are not

Not true. A lot of people with chronic sleep problems (e.g. sleep apnea) feel tired during the day but have no idea why, and don't wake up during the night or have any other direct symptoms that would lead them to have a strong hypothesis for "bad sleep" being the root cause.

Datapoints for each night can help you isolate the causes of poor sleep in your life. An objective measure, even a flawed one, can help a lot in that process.

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