New Sleep Management and Smart Alarm App

Hello everyone,

I’d like to share an idea for a new app designed to enhance sleep management on Garmin’s latest watches, specifically optimized for the Fenix 8. This app aims to improve the wake-up experience by utilizing the advanced sensors in the watch to ensure users wake up at the most natural time, without needing to set alarms manually.

Key Features:

  1. Automatic Alarm Based on Sleep Cycles:

    • The app automatically sets an alarm after five 90-minute sleep cycles, beginning from when the watch detects you’ve fallen asleep. This helps to ensure a natural, less abrupt wake-up experience.
  2. “Bedtime Preparation” Notification:

    • If the user has a scheduled event in the calendar or has set a manual alarm, the app sends a notification for the ideal bedtime (30 minutes + 5 sleep cycles before the set wake-up time). This ensures enough time for winding down and completing five sleep cycles.
  3. Smart Mode and Customization:

    • The app works automatically in the background and activates the smart alarm feature only when there are no calendar events or manual alarms set by the user.
    • When calendar events or alarms are set, the app provides an optimal bedtime recommendation, helping the user to get adequate rest for the day ahead.

This app offers a smarter, more personalized approach to wake-up and sleep management, harnessing the full potential of Garmin Fenix's sleep sensors to ensure optimal rest and natural wake-up timing.

  • Hi 5036757,

    Great idea!
    I’m actually working on a very similar project—a scenario-based sleep stage detector for Garmin watches, designed to analyze only the available sensor history (heart rate, stress, body battery, etc.) and estimate sleep cycles and stages (deep, light, REM, awake) using my own algorithm.

    A few things I’ve learned so far:

    • Garmin’s Connect IQ SDK doesn’t provide access to native sleep stage data (such as REM or deep/light sleep). All detection has to be done with raw sensor history (HR, HRV, movement, stress, BB), but with a well-tuned algorithm it can work surprisingly well.

    • Automatic alarms and bedtime recommendations based on sleep cycles are possible—if you can reliably detect when the user falls asleep, you can calculate cycles and trigger alarms or bedtime reminders accordingly.

    • Smart background operation is limited: background tasks can only run for a few seconds every 5 minutes (SDK limitation), so your logic must be highly optimized and focus on recent historical data.

    • I also upvoted the feature request for native sleep stage APIs—if Garmin opens this up, it will make everything much easier and more accurate!

    If you’d like, I can share more details about my approach, or we could even collaborate. Feel free to reach out or reply if you want to exchange ideas or discuss possible solutions.

    Good luck with your project!

  • I left this side-project cause I don’t have much free time to learn a new Programming language, SDK and build the app all alone. But if we collaborate we can do this!