I don’t think sleep tracking depending on phone mic is accurate and apps that work with smartwatches aren’t great for getting data out of them (and require sleeping with something on).
I have some ideas on simple solutions for tracking sleep timings without automated systems (and easier data transfer) but I’m curious: what do you guys do for tracking?
Emfit QS automatically tracks when I go to bed and leave the bed
I use a fitbit charge 4. Several years ago I tried to use a phone app that tracked movements, but it wasn’t very accurate and did not give me sleep phase data. This is my second fitbit. It is very insightful.
Lonnie
I use a Fitbit Charge3 to capture the data and Eventloggers.com to visualize it. It took me about a month to get used to wearing it to bed but now I don’t notice it at all. Getting the data out and into visualizations is free and easy but you need to accumulate enough data to see trends, I think.
Some examples:
I look at that graph and I see things like my mom’s final battle with her cancer (the dip in Jan of 2020) and the final weeks of my dog battling his cancer (the dip in Nov. 2020). And my short-lived vacation from tracking. The fitbit isn’t perfect but it’s a good enough measure to illustrate that your family’s health affects your own health - or at least the quality/quantity of your sleep.
Pretty easy to spot my recent “all-nighter” and the “sick day” that followed a few days later. It’s also accurate enough to see that I’m still splitting my sleep - Mon-Fri I wake up, get the kids to school and then crawl back to bed for a bit.
eventloggers looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. might give that a try then, I have a fitbit charge 2 but I stopped using it for sleep since I wasn’t getting much out of the data
30$ miband 3. its imperfect and manually log too in mysymptoms
No need to wear your wearable to bed: If you carry a step counter right up to bed (and don’t read in bed), the last and first steps of the day are a good approximation of your bedtime (and activity levels; see e.g. in this experiment).
I also use the “Flip to Shhh” feature on my Android phone while sleeping, so that would be another, convenient way to capture rest times (if Google let me have the data)…
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