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Sleep tracking accuracy

The sleep tracking on the Venu is waaaaay off for me. I like the watch, but the sleep analysis and accuracy makes me consider returning it. It often reports me going to sleep several hours before I actually go to bed. I've been wearing the Fitbit ionic and the Samsung Galaxy watch on my other wrist to compare and those 2 seem to be pretty spot on. The ionic is so precise I can actually use it as a diary of what happened during the night. I often have a hard time sleeping consistently and therefore wake up a lot. My awake times are reported to be around 45+- every night on the ionic and WA2 while the Venu says around 5mins. I know this is soooo wrong. Makes me question all the other details about deep sleep, light sleep and REM. Right now this part of the watch is just unusable.

Anyone with the same experience?  Is a fix coming?

  • Garmin sleep tracking ist not good. No 20 dollars fitness tracker has such a bad sleep tracking. Last night garmin told me, that i was sleeping 10 hours but i was awake and had an awful sleep... 

    Polar has started with the ignite to calculate sleep within the training, i hope garmin never does this...it would not work with current sleep tracking Grinning

    I am at garmin for 2 years now, no fix and no sign from garmin. 

    I also came from fitbit, had samsung and other tracker and Smartwatches. Overall Garmin is still the best choice for me but i hope that they hear to the customers. Maybe my next watch could be another one.

  • Same here.  There were only two things about Ionic that I liked over Garmin watches - step counting and sleep tracking.  Fitbit excels in these areas and Garmin struggles pretty badly.  I've also noticed that overall, Fitbit was more accurate with HR than any of the Garmin watches I've tried so far.  Garmin is miles better in every other way, especially GPS.

  • No way is Fitbit more accurate in steps. At least none of the newer bands. Had the Fitbit Charge 3 and Inspire HR and both counted around 20% more steps in allday activity like working. I had a Fitbit One tracker for years which was very accurate cause I wore it on my body. F.e. when Fitbit One said 10.000 steps Garmin watches always had like 12.000 on normal days, not only walking but doing stuff with your hands. And the last Fitbit bands I owned always had around 14.000. Only beaten by Polar watches with around 100% more steps (20.000) on busy days. Way less accurate so, I would even say that this is really a shame for Fitbit selling bands that can't handle moving and steps as other companies can. 

    HR is quite the same on my experience. Maybe in some activities like strength training Fitbit was a little better but overall I think HR accuracy is quite comparable. Resting HR is another topic. I never understood either but Fitbit was way off with resting HR, Garmin is way closer. But that is something that you can find out yourself by just looking at the lowest HR during night and day yourself.

    When it comes to sleep this is really right. Even though Fitbit sleep tracking accuracy got worse over the last months introducing sleep score. But before that it was always spot on, esp. in tracking awake phases. This is really the worst aspect of Garmin's sleep tracking. They don't recognize awake phases. I always have around 30-60mins more sleep on my Garmin than on Fitbit. And what's the worst part of it? Before introducing REM sleep phase I think last year or the year before Garmin almost every time got at least the overall sleep time right. It was almost always quite the same as Fitbit. Maybe 10-20mins more, but overall sleep time, not comparing sleep phases, was really quite accurate. Then came REM sleep introduction and things got messed up. And they have done zero improvement since then. They have done nothing to improve anything even so this problem is known for many many months. 

    I love Garmin watches and I think, even so they haven quite a few bugs, which fitness band manufacture hasn't? But Garmin is the only one besides Apple giving software updates even years after introducing the device. This is besides all the bugs still great and good service, although they rarely introduce new features after some time. But I'm really annoyed by how they handle sleep tracking. Complains over complains for so long and they don't do anything. Of course first it is a fitness watch but why can't they put them money and staff in to get this more accurate. This isn't a device problem but a platform problem. So they "only" need to fix it in the Connect SW platform, not on each device separately as far as I can tell. 

    Please Garmin, improve sleep tracking and get it at least as accurate as before the REM sleep phase introduction. 

  • My sleep tracking experience is almost the opposite of what is described above. This morning, my VA3 reported 8 minutes of sleep. In fact, I fell asleep in front of the TV around 8:30 PM and woke up around 4 AM. I might have been awake about 15 or 20 minutes during that time as I got up to go to transfer to my bed around 9:40. I adjusted my start and end times and now Connect says I slept 2 hours and 22 minutes. 

    Yesterday, when I awoke, Connect initially calculated my sleep time using the basic calculation of the old devices without heart rate, etc. It showed about 7 hours of sleep which was more or less correct. The basic method doesn't calculate REM. Sometime during the day, it recalculated based on its advanced algorithm and the final result was 1 hour and 12 minutes with 12 minutes of REM using the same start and stop times as the basic calculation.

    It's very discouraging. 

  • Where Garmin fails me on step counting is when I am doing anything that requires my arm to be in a steady position, like pushing a shopping cart.  Where my Fitbit would record all of my steps during these times, the Garmin watches I've tried barely record anything.  Another example is mowing the lawn.  These are not activities that I do that often, but it would be nice to get the steps when I do.

  • During the last couple of months I've tested the Galaxy watch active 2, Polar Ignite, Suunto 9 Baro, Garmin Venu and the Fitbit ionic (which I've had for 2 years). They all have their pros and cons I guess, but as we're discussing sleep tracking the Garmin watch is by far the worst of the bunch. This really surprises me as Garmin supposedly is this giganotosaurus in the fitness world. Why can't they get this right when all the others kinda do? It doesn't even record naps! We have a newborn in the house which means I often wake up early and go to sleep again after a couple of hours. Watch active 2, Ignite and ionic all record this. Can't remember how the Baro 9 was in this regard as I returned after 1 week. Many will aks the question how important is sleep tracking in the long run? Most people have their routines and go to bed and wake up at the same times every day. For me this is tricky as I for some reason feel fatigued a lot of days and I think this has to do with my bad sleep. Therefore the sleep analysis is important. I really like what Polar has done with their newest watches with a summary of your sleep and a report with recommendations of either rest or exercises the following day. This is the future imo..

    Regarding step counting I can't fault the Venu as it seems correct. Venu and Watch active 2 is actually pretty much in sync step wise. Fitbit ionic is always 2-3000 steps ahead of those 2 in days I count around 10000.

    GPS on the Venu is ok, but I expected better. For me it hasn't been noticeably better than the others.

  • The Bad Thing? Garmin dosent read her own Forum. The latest fw ist full of Bugs since 3 weeks.

    Garmin dosent Care. 

    My venu comes tomorrow. But....try the Huawei Watch GT. Sleep Tracking including naps are great

  • I'm actually considering the Huawei GT2.. Seems to be very underrated compared to more known brands like Garmin. What I dislike about Huawei and Samsung is that they doesn't have a Web interface like Garmin, Polar and Suunto have. I prefer using a pc vs my phone to see my workout calendar, compare stats etc..

    ... and from what I've read Huawei doesn't sync with Strava which is a bummer for me. 

  • Correct. But the Watch itself ist one of the top devices. But Huawei dosent like to make it better with some Software deccisions. Nobody understand that way.

    Again...but....for 120 bucks it outperform many other devices. Never see a nap log Like this. 

    My venu comes tomorrow but i guess IT makes nö sense. What you get for 359€ is a big joke. Im mit a Betatester. 

  • Night 1 with the venu. No sleep tracker data. HR was on but sleep datas dosent appear

    Im wearing the Watch GT active and the Venu lefht und right, little wired but a like to see the differneces.