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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

You mention you bought a wristband. Tracking my sleep is one of those things I want to start doing. Do you have any recommendations?

I don't particularly want to remember to put it on every night. I know Nokia launched a mattress pad recently (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/sleep) but I'm concerned about how reliable this is if I don't sleep exactly on top of it. (Plus I don't know how this could actually tell anything like sleep cycles and what not, or even detect that I'm asleep vs. watching TV in bed)

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Hi. I'm a software engineer at Fitbit. It is not my job to speak for Fitbit or to sell Fitbits, but I'm answering you because it gives me the chance to point out three reasons why this article's quote about Fitbits not being accurate about sleep stages is wrong.

1. The researcher is also an entrepreneur whose product's sales depend on people thinking Fitbit isn't good enough. https://sonicsleepcoach.com/about-dr-dan/ 2. The quote lumps Fitbit and Apple Watch together in terms of how frequently heart rate is measured, when there's a 60x difference. A sincere quote would be more along the lines of "Apple Watch's 1-5 minute sample rate certainly isn't enough, but even Fitbit's 1-5 second sample rate won't give the accuracy you need..." 3. He doesn't say what's wrong with any published study showing sleep stage accuracy of Fitbit, notably https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/40/suppl_1/A26/378095...

Not the parent, but I've been using the Oura ring (https://ouraring.com/) for almost a year and it works very well for sleep tracking. It's a sleep tracker above all, and has rather limited exercise tracking. It tracks resting heart rate, sleep phases, body temperature, and breathing. There's also an API to download data from their cloud service, although I haven't tried it.

I haven't yet received the newer model, but it seems to solve the issue of limited battery life in the previous model and the ring is also significantly smaller.

Woah, that's cool. I'll try it out, thanks for the pointer!

I was looking for something cheap with as much packed features as I can get and settled on Huawei Band Pro 2 (https://consumer.huawei.com/en/wearables/band2). You can get it for 70 bucks, and it tracks your sleep, heart rate and even has built in GPS if you want to jog or cycle.

The easiest win for your sleep might be removing the TV from your bedroom

I wonder if you considered that my concern is still valid when replacing "watching TV" with "reading a book".

I wonder if you considered that maybe I use my bed throughout the day for non-sleep-related activities.

I wonder if you considered that "watching TV" might have been an example, and I don't actually have a TV in my bedroom.

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