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Shift work and Sleep tracking

Former Member over 10 years ago

I seem to be having some issues with the sleep tracking as I'm a shift worker and my sleep patterns are highly variable.

Best way to highlight my issues is to give an example, slightly simplified: (default bed time is set to 0000hrs to 0800hrs and I use the buttons on my watch to set sleep on/off to get actual values)

Monday I changed over from day to night shifts - woke up at 0800hrs after 7 hours sleep, had a 3 hour nap in the afternoon -> sleep page for that day shows 7h sleep + 3h nap = 10h... so far, so good

Tuesday I got home from work and ended up sleeping from 1200hrs till 2000hrs -> sleep page for that day shows 8h sleep (default bedtime 0000hrs to 0800hrs) + 8h nap (watch sleep on/off period 1200hrs to 2000hrs) = 16h -> it thinks I've had two 8 hour sleeps... obviously wrong, so I corrected my actual hours asleep to match reality... it still shows 16 hours sleep... except now it's counting the same 8 hour period twice rather than two separate 8 hour periods like it was before... likely because it's still deciding the button press period is a nap, not sleep time so won't override it with the manual setting.
Not winning here, so I set the sleep time to 00:00hrs - 00:00hrs -> sleep shows as 0h, nap as 8h... not ideal, but I can live with that.... except when I view the sleep trend, it only shows "sleep" not total, so looks like I didn't sleep that day... at the end of this run of nightshifts, it's going to look like I haven't slept in 4 nights.

I accept that my situation is more complex to handle/code for, but shift workers aren't exactly rare, and honestly, sleep tracking/trending is going to be more helpful to us than it is to people who work 8am - 5pm Monday to Friday and have a fairly steady bedtime. It looks like the fix would be relatively simple... there currently is some criteria being triggered that excludes my button presses for sleep on/off on the watch from being counted as sleep time and forcing it into nap time instead... likely because it falls totally outside the default bedtime.... I can kind of see why this is happening under normal circumstances, but when i update my actual sleep time, if it overlaps, it needs to realise and flip the nap back to sleep to avoid double counting.

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0 TourleTour over 10 years ago

Yep, that is a great summary of the problems I am seeing! Essentially I would like to see it just allow as many sleep periods in a single day as I told it I was having.

I also have a sneaking suspicion at the moment that if I get up during the nomial sleep period, then go back to sleep, then get up again, telling it each time of course, it counts all that time towards the sleeping time total.

0 Former Member over 10 years ago

I am seeing a similar issue being a night worker myself.

My actual work time varies across my 5 day week so it is impossible to setup the SLEEP start & end times within the app, (they are set to default 00:00 to 00:00), I manually press the button to put my Vivofit 2 into SLEEP mode when I go to bed & then press the button again to exit SLEEP mode when waking.

I have only had my Vivofit 2 since 24th April, so only 3 days.

The first day I got my Vivofit was Friday, the day before my 5 day shift starts.

On a Friday I try to have a nap in the day as then I am awake right through until around 6pm Saturday evening.

So, on this Friday 24th April I settled down for a nap and set the Vivofit to SLEEP mode.

When I woke up I exited the SLEEP mode function, performed a sync but no sleep time showed up within the app or on the Connect webpage.

I decided to manually enter the sleep time using approx times.

The following day, Saturday 25th April around mid morning I just happened to be glancing through the Garmin Connect app and I noticed that sleep time had been entered, very strange as I had not been asleep since the afternoon of the day before and I had manually entered that period.

Upon further inspection I noticed that the time period displayed for this 'GHOST' Saturday sleep was extremely similar to my approx entry for the previous day, Friday.

Because at the time I noticed this, around 11am on Saturday & it was showing that I had slept between 14:00 & 15:53 that day, which is in the future :confused: & as yet I don't think TIME TRAVEL is possible!!!

Not being able to actually delete this spurious entry I had to just change the start & finish times to 00:00, so time slept would show 0 hrs.

Realizing that this was the true start & finish times from my sleep the day previously, I adjusted my manual entry for that day to reflect this.

That Saturday night I went to bed at around 17:20 & woke up at 00:20 the following day, Sunday, putting my Vivofit into SLEEP mode & exiting from it all by hand & not via setting the times in the app.

According to the app after syncing it shows that did not sleep at all on Saturday & that the whole sleep I had just had was allocated to Sunday, even though only actually 20 minutes of it was into Sunday.

I have since noticed this peculiar behaviour with my sleep on Sunday afternoon being allocated as Monday's sleep.

It would look like the system is set up to allocate a night's sleep started prior to 23:59:59, to the following days quota, which, if a person is a regular day shift worker and sleeps a normal pattern each night, is not an issue, but for night workers that sleep during the day prior to the start of a night shift, it all gets a little messy by adding this day sleep to the following day, even if this time is actually a point in the future and hasn't even happened yet.

It takes a bit to get your head around it.

I'll keep working on this and post back further results.

Regards..,

0 Former Member over 5 years ago

I have just bought the fenix 6x pro and the problem is still here. 5 years Later. Unbelievable.

+1 Former Member over 5 years ago in reply to Former Member

I have bought a Forerunner 945, not cheap. I really love it. But being one of millions of shift workers I do find that all of the wellbeing apps and devices seem to ignore us.

Come on, there is a wealth of free data here garmin. Please use it. How can body battery and things work for us?

0 2595845 over 4 years ago in reply to Former Member

We are finding the same with our new watches. I can't believe my 5yo Samsung watch can get this right but Garmin still can't work it out

0 trux over 4 years ago in reply to 2595845

Try widening the sleep hours in the device settings. For example from 00:00 to 23:59. That does the trick for me.

0 Former Member over 4 years ago in reply to Former Member

I just purchased the Venu and I also do shift work. Three nights a week I'm working 12 hr overnights and then I go straight into a 24hr shift (allowed to sleep at night) and I can sometimes nap an hour or two on my 12 hrs but my Venu doesn't pick up naps, or my sleeping when I return home in the morning. How can a $500 watch not do this but my old $150 Fitbit could? Super disappointed in my purchase. Without the sleep properly tracked, other features won't be correct.

0 3524734 over 3 years ago

Garmin doesn't care about shift workers.

0 Foxx90 over 1 year ago

8 years later, and Garmin is still pretty useless when it comes to shift work and sleep tracking.

0 Foxx90 over 1 year ago

8 years later, similar issues. I have an Epix V2 watch and I work shift work, swinging between days and full night shifts.

Currently, my watch seems completely unable to track my sleep properly, and this is affecting other metrics. Re-programming the sleep schedule constantly is a big inconvenience.

As a workaround, I have tried setting the sleep schedule to just 1 minute duration (16:00-16:01) I then tried to use the "sleep mode on/off" option in the watch menu, when I go to bed and wake up. But i ran into another problem - that this doesnt actually switch sleep mode off fully. So it was showing me on/off asleep for 13 hours or more - including whilst i was up and about doing things, my watch counting steps, making me out to be a serious sleep-walker. I found i have to go to into the sleep mode "glance" on the watch, and switch sleep mode off from there.

Either way, its really unreliable - especiallly if sleep mode isnt activted at night.