Researcher Hacks Nine Sleep-Tracking Devices To Test Their Accuracy (brown.edu)

A determined researcher at Brown University extracted "the previously irretrievable sleep tracking data from the Hello Sense, from the Microsoft Band, and nine other popular devices," according to an anonymous reader, "by decompiling the apps and using man-in-the-middle attacks." Then they compared each device's data to that from a research-standard actigraph. Their results? The Fitbit Alta seems to be the most accurate among the other nine in terms of sleep versus awake data... Our findings tell that these consumer-level sleep reports should be taken with a grain of salt, but regardless we're happy to see more and more people investing in improving their sleep.

Comments

Re:Does the obvious exist?

[rgbatduke]

You'll do better by buying and wearing a recording pulse oximeter to bed. If you have obstructive sleep apnea (which is pretty common, especially in older people) you typically stop breathing as your throat closes when you relax in real sleep. This drops your O2 saturation, which triggers a reflex that wakes you up. So your O2 sat oscillates up and down all night long, and you live tired all of the time because the only real sleep you get happens when your head and throat are in a "just right" position. Sleep apnea is dangerous both acutely and chronically -- inadequate sleep is associated with weight gain, heart disease, and more. The "pulse" part is also useful, as one can often identify periods of REM vs deep sleep as one's pulse varies somewhat, smoothing out during deep sleep cycles, bouncing around a bit with the arousal of REM.

There are other causes of bad sleep, of course -- restless legs syndrome, anxiety, etc. and these may be characterized more by movements and tossing and turning and not so much by oxygen, but a pulse oximeter might be almost as useful as a fitbit or whatever for detecting that via the pulse variations.

rgb