Related
Options

Sleep tracking accuracy - latest status

3214823
over 3 years ago

Dear all, 

first of all really excited to hopefully soon join the Garmin community. I am very close to getting myself a Fenix 6 pro and have done many ours reading up on reviews, this forum, etc. Alternative would be to wait for the Fenix 7 (and I have also read the threads in this forum to be aware that no one knows when it will be launched). 

The one thing that is keeping me back is the seemingly weak sleep tracking accuracy. This is for me a key functionality and I need it to be at least somewhat trustworthy. 

There have been a number of posts on it, but most of them are >1y old. The latest one is https://forums.garmin.com/outdoor-recreation/outdoor-recreation/f/fenix-6-series/248054/sleep-tracking-accuracy-after-update-13-00  - which is 4m old and does not give too many insights. 

At the same time I see that updates to sleep tracking have been mentioned in recent firmware releases. 

Long story short I have two questions: 

1. What is the most recent perspective on sleep tracking accuracy of the Fenix 6?

2. In case it is still bad - what is your hypothesis for the root cause of it - bad hardware (in which case I'd rather wait for the 7 and hope they improve it) or bad software (in which case I could go for the 6 and trust that Garmin will continue to update)?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

A

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Mizzu

    I have exactly the same problem. I bought a Fenix 7 Pro Saphire watch recently, and I have been using it for two weeks now. 

    My watch is very accurate with the time-tracking in when I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning, but the rest of it seems to be unreliable.

    The watch tells me frequently that I am awake in the night for over 0.5-1.5 hours but I generally sleep well and don't wake up at all during the night. Taking a look at the plots, it seems to me that my watch mixes up REM phases and record them as being awake.  

    I am very disappoined about it, as this watch was very expensive. I hope Garmin will improve sleep tracking and send software updates to fix this problem.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Bandi

    For me it's the opposite. I tend to get lower than recommended REM and more light than recommended. If I wake up early, but stay in bed with closed eyes trying to fall asleep again, then it usually counts that awake time as REM.

    It's likely a hard problem to dial in the exact phases for different people. Maybe the sleep score should've been modeled more like the HRV status where you get your individual baseline to compare your current value to. On the whole the start and end time are reliable for me and generally a higher score means better sleep than a lower score.

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    I have a Fenex 6X.  This morning I woke at about 6am.  For about an hour I worked on my iPhone.  I checked my sleep performance which reported that last hour as Deep Sleep.  There is something very flawed in the algorithm that determines sleep stages.