Related

Sleep Tracking not Accurate

3565296

Hello,

I know that this topic may have been brought up frequently in the past.
However, I would still like to know why my Forerunner 265 is not able to perform reasonably accurate sleep tracking.

I wear the watch tightly on my wrist, including overnight. I have set the sleep settings correctly. The heart rate sensor runs during the night as well. There is no power-saving mode or anything else that could interfere. The sensor is clean; there are no deposits, dirt, or anything similar.

Nevertheless, it shows strange sleep onset times. As soon as I lie in bed and stop moving or try to fall asleep, it registers this as light sleep.

When I wake up in the middle of the night (which happens often because I pray for about 10 minutes during the night) and then fall back asleep, the Garmin simply shows that I am no longer asleep from the time I woke up.

Today my REM phase was only 10 minutes. In the days before, it was also very low. Deep sleep seems to be recorded reasonably well, I think? Honestly, I’m not sure, but the values look normal.

Before my Garmin, I had a Fitbit Inspire 3. It cost €50. It recorded my sleep perfectly. Wake-up times were 100% accurate. Everything else (deep sleep, REM, etc.) corresponded, in my opinion, to reality.

Why (and this is really not meant in a negative way) can a €50 watch track my sleep so well, but the €450 Garmin cannot?

Unfortunately, I also have the problem that my heart rate is not always displayed up to date. I am relatively satisfied overall, and in some cases I even find the measurements better than the Fitbit (but only partially). However, I still have the feeling that the heart rate is not updated immediately. This was not really an issue with the Fitbit.

Overall, it is a very great watch, but I find it really disappointing that other watches costing much less provide far better sleep tracking. I believe sleep tracking is very important because it determines the Body Battery and therefore influences the recommendations made by Garmin.

Can we expect an update in the near future that addresses this issue?

And yes, I know that the Forerunner is designed for running, but in my opinion, that is not a reason to introduce a sleep tracking function that is extremely inaccurate.

I also do not think it is justified to buy additional Garmin accessories (such as a chest heart rate monitor or a sleep tracker) when there are watches that cost much less and can do this very accurately without additional accessories.

Can we expect updates for models like the Forerunner 265 that will significantly improve this?

I am honestly considering returning the watch.

Thank you.

  • 0

    I wanted to add something today:

    Today I wore both the Fitbit Inspire 3 and the Garmin 265.

    I have to say: the wake-up and fall-asleep times are identical and match quite well.

    What really impressed me is that the DEEP SLEEP phases are identical on both the Fitbit and the Garmin. The duration and the exact timing are identical, with only about a ±2 minute difference.

    The only thing that is problematic: REM sleep tracking is catastrophic on the Garmin, and if you wake up once — like I did again today — the sleep after that is no longer tracked. The Fitbit, on the other hand, continues to track it.

    I also noticed that the heart rate sensor on the Garmin does not react to immediate changes. I compared it with the Fitbit yesterday and ran up the stairs. While the Fitbit immediately showed a change in my heart rate, the Garmin stayed at the normal heart rate for about 5–10 seconds.

    Can we expect improvements here in the future that would allow the heart rate sensor to respond much more intensively to such situations, similar to the Fitbit?

  • 0 in reply to 3565296

    I suspect the problem lies with the optical heart rate sensor.  If you look in the other threads many of us are having issues with the sensor.  The seat of my pants thinking is that the sensor is not detecting when you are going back to sleep after waking up.  Just a thought.  We are hoping that Garmin will release an update to the optical heart rate sensor to solve these issues.