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Comment by nanna | Hacker News Reader

> sharing biometric data through pre-loaded health and wellness apps.

I've been thinking about finally getting a smartwatch to keep tabs on my sleep and encourage me to do more exercise, like jogging for a certain amount of time or something. Suggestions for privacy respecting, ideally FOSS solutions?

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> I've been thinking about finally getting a smartwatch to keep tabs on my sleep and encourage me to do more exercise, like jogging for a certain amount of time or something.

Do people really need watches to able to sleep normally or get some exercise?

Techy people enjoy stats and metrics you can review. It's fun to pull up my sleep data and compare averages between last 7 days/31 days/12 months. It's interesting to see my heart rate at different points during exercise or other activities. Sometimes I can recall what I was doing on a particular day just looking at the amount of steps.

One thing to keep in mind is that studies that evaluate the sleep tracking of smartwatches and smartphones typically show them to be wildly inaccurate, to the point of being useless

https://pine64.org/devices/pinetime/

This was a really helpful answer, thank you. I'm not sure why you've been downvoted.

For iPhone there's Out-Run [0] which is a great open source running app with no vendor tracking (it optionally tracks your runs locally).

For exercise, I would kindly suggest you don't make things over complicated. There's no tech solution that prevents you from putting on a pair of running shoes, getting outside and finding out what does and doesn't work yourself.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/out-run/id1477511092

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