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How well is your fitness tracker monitoring your sleep?

May 26, 2017

Queensland researchers have found that fitness tracking devices generally lack accuracy when it comes to estimating total sleep time, sleep efficiency and how long it takes the wearers to fall asleep.

Specialists at Greenslopes Private Hospital’s Sleep and Lung Centre, University of Queensland, and Snore Australia studied the accuracy of five different Consumer Grade Sleep and Fitness devices by comparing them to a sleep study (polysomnography).

These devices were: Fitbit Charge HR, Peak Basis, Microsoft Band 2, Beddit, and ResMed S+.

Participants underwent a full overnight sleep study test, while being monitored by the consumer tracking devices at the same time.

Researchers measured five categories: patients’ sleep onset latency, total sleep time, wake after sleep onset, sleep efficiency and time in bed.

“While the devices were useful for measuring the amount of time spent in bed, they were not particularly useful for calculating sleep onset – in other words, how long it takes for a person to fall asleep,” said Dr Sean Tolhurst, Respiratory and Sleep Physician at Greenslopes Private Hospital.

“This means although a person may be lying awake in bed for an hour before dozing off, a tracking device will count some of this period as sleep,” said Dr Tolhurst.

“We also found the tracking devices were not especially accurate at picking up short periods of wakefulness.”

The research also found these tracking devices were more accurate when recording sleep patterns of patients who did not have sleeping disorders compared to those who did.

The new research will be presented at SLEEP 2017 in Boston USA. This conference, which involves more than 5,000 sleep medicine professionals and scientists, is the premier world forum for discussion of the latest developments in clinical sleep medicine and sleep circadian science.

Dr Tolhurst said it is important to understand the role of tracking devices for both personal health monitoring and clinical purposes.

“The results confirm that polysomnography is still the most reliable method for diagnosing and monitoring sleep disturbances because it measures a patient’s breathing, heart rate, brain waves, and blood oxygen levels,” said Dr Tolhurst.

“However, we now know that these tracking devices can be used to help us gain better insight into our patients’ day-to-day sleeping habits when they are at home over a period of several weeks or longer. We used to ask patients to keep a sleep diary, but these tracking devices are accurate enough to produce a creditable snapshot of their sleeping trends over time,” said Dr Tolhurst.

For more information about Dr Sean Tolhurst, click here .