For anyone who uses an activity tracker regularly, the correlation between poor quality (or lack thereof) sleep isn’t a coincidence. Garmin have taken a great leap forward with their latest software update to allow you far better tracking of sleep.
In their blog post there is an excellent summary of light, deep and REM sleep and the importance of each for your mind and body. The update has utilised more granular data to track the stages of sleep as well as the time you spend in each.
In the past, Garmin devices only used movement and heart rate to analyze your sleep. With this update, if you have a compatible watch, we’re using additional data — such as heart rate variability — to better measure your time awake and time spent in each sleep stage.
The update, rolling out now, is targeting a range of Garmin watches including the vívoactive 3, Forerunner 645, Forerunner 935, vívosport, vívosmart 3, vívomove HR, vivoactive 3 Music and Forerunner 645 Music.
Clearly a lot of time, consultation and effort have been put into the update and has already shown its worth to me.
Does the upgraded sleep tracking give you a reason to grab a Garmin?
Considering that due to severe sleep apnea I need to get a CPAP machine, a sleep tracker like what Garmin are doing, would be a VERY useful secondary device to have.
now if they could just do something like hire Eric formerly of Pebble Smartwatches or someone with similar skills I would jump to their platform, they have good hardware with always on display (passive display tech) but can’t do the kind of notification responses Pebble could 2.5 years ago or the apps they had even longer ago.
fitbit seems to be refining their platform quickly but so far just serves the folks who like light up screen watches (kind of a stretch of the term) where the screen is off and black by default 🙂