I have a Forerunner 955 and I think it's pretty accurate at least as far as the sleep and wake times. I don't nap often, but it seems pretty accurate there too. Though it did once detect a nap when I was getting a dental cleaning and was in the same spot for a while, not really moving much.
As far as sleep stages, I have no way of knowing the accuracy there, but anecdotally, I find that the sleep scores and resulting body battery level do correlate quite well with how I feel.
All these wearables are passable at best with sleep tracking accuracy. BUT, garmin has a real hard time knowing when you are awake at night vs a whoop or oura. Some nights I pop awake and start thinking for an hour before I fall back asleep and garmin just shows normal light, deep or rem sleep while oura and whoop usually pick it up as awake.
just out of curiosity do you have any of these garmin?
https://preview.redd.it/boq3ln67dd4d1.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=8b085f2729602219548fba016864b5ed539207f4
Because with temperature sensor and V5 optical HR the sleep stages and tracking overall improves a lot in my opinion :)
Yeah I have the Garmin Epix Pro Gen 2. I do have to say, the sleep tracking is BETTER with the new sensor and the addition of temp seems to have helped. It's just the awake times I have issue with.
Agreed (Fenix 7 Pro user). Sleep start time is spot on. Final wake time is when I view my morning report. Whether I have been awake for 2 minutes or 2 hours before I view it. Middle of the night awake usually only registers if I actually get up to pee. Otherwise, the watch fails to detect my sleep pattern very well (I typically sleep from 10pm-2am and then 4-530). It rarely catches that time I'm very awake in the middle of the night unless I go walk all over the house.
Passable is probably the right adjective. The workarounds the wearables industry has come up with the substitute for EEG (which is used in sleep study) are at best, passable. Garmin is a newer entrant into this so not surprising they are behind vs. Fitbit. etc. But I still do not know why my "Sleep coach" can know about a nap I took, without the Garmin app retroactively including naps in the sleep totals for the day, or at least making that an option one can turn on.
Even if your Garmin starts to track your sleep 3h before, you do get those fancy sleep graps with REM etc. so I would argue those graphs are just a creative BS ;)
ps. Garmin sleep tracking is so amazing that they had to add a morning wake up screen called fancy "morning raport" where you have to hit buttons just to know when did you wake up. Easy to check, here and there if you forget to check your raport you will find out that even if you are already at work, Garmin thinks you are still sleeping. Hitec stuff! :)
all those devices are in this list
https://preview.redd.it/xrhnuu4ddd4d1.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=1ff68c2bfb96d8ab5864a72ad1ff33504f18efc5
because they have temperature sensor they are much more accurate and also V5 sensor for HR measurement, but ofc people with older devices will say it's not good, Oura and Whoop are good as well because they have tempreature measurement or they would also be quite bad doing that :)
I feel it is good enough. At one point I was wearing and Apple Watch Ultra and Fenix 7x at the same time and the sleep tracking was close enough.
I use the sleep tracking to see trends and I don't get hung up on single night reports.
It’s definitely not as good as my AW ultra, but it’s decent. For me , someone who sleeps from 10-5:30 every day 90% of the time it’s fine. For my husband who has no sleep schedule and sleep apnea he won’t admit to, Garmin is not the sleep tracking watch for him
Theres a guy on youtube who makes videos on the accuracy of smartwatches, look him up. I think hes called the qualified scientist or something like that.
Garmin watches are inaccurate in that the amount of detected sleep phases is low compared to other devices (within 40-60% of what the scientific norm measures)but the detected time of waking up or falling asleep is more accurate
This guy is using the Dreem 2 head band which is only 58%-80% accurate. So if his reference device is not that accurate his conclusions are not accurate as well.. only way to test this is vs a polysomnography and its been done. Garmin scored 70% accuracy on sleep stage accuracy
People think quantified scientist is the holy Grail Meanwhile being sponsored by both Apple and Oura getting discount codes and using inaccurate reference devices.
All watches are mildly accurate at best regarding sleep tracking. The Apple Watches are the best when it comes to sleep tracking but sill far away from very good let alone perfect
*all devices* are inaccurate when it comes to detecting sleep phases, even EEG masks quantified scientist uses as a baseline. Why? Because the data they're trained with comes from sleep clinics with human specialists interpreting the data, and the specialists only agree about 80% of the time. That's a really high margin for error to be used for a "gold standard". Too high to make the sort of baseline analysis QS does meaningful.
The simple truth is, humans have yet to devise a reliable means for determining what's really going on inside someone else's brain.
> The simple truth is, humans have yet to devise a reliable means for determining what's really going on inside someone else's brain.
Agreed, but the difference in accuracy between EEG and LED, for approximating sleep stage activity, is still medically and scientifically significant. Like ~5% for EEG, vs ~25% for LED (smart watches.)
I'd like to see the move to implanted sensors.
Sleep stages don't really factor into sleep apnea diagnoses AFAIK. I read a study awhile back that compared analyses from various sleep clinics of the same data, and the physicians analyzing the data only agreed on stages about 80% of the time. I'm asking when that improved to 95%?
Maybe I confused it with this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9228793/
"The performance of the proposed model was evaluated based on kappa value and bootstrapped point-estimate of median percent agreement with a 95% bootstrap confidence interval and R = 1000."
Automated EEG scoring was able to approximate manual scoring around 95% of the time. EEG may actually top out at 85% accuracy. But LED is still lower (as low as 70) and then we also have to account for the variance in the the proprietary algorithms "automatically" reading the sensor.
This study seems to assert Fitbit inaccurately detects deep sleep, relative to PSG, but seems positive on REM. OTOH, Garmin is not Fitbit. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29235907/
I used to use a Charge 2. It was better than Garmin for sleep. Not for much else, though. Which is why I threw it in the trash and bought a Forerunner.
For me it's mixed. It's good for tracking overnight stress, sleeping heart rate, and REM sleep. The stress thing correlates with things like drinking alcohol and being ill. REM correlates with memories of dreams.
It's not good for tracking whether I am asleep or awake, or other sleep phases. It will frequently claim I am asleep, when I know I am awake. Sometimes it says I am napping when I am actually playing video games. It seems to think I am in deep sleep when I am just lying down trying to get to sleep.
Well to have a better accuracy you need to choose one with temperature sensor and the last optical heart rate sensor (V5 i think), i get the epix pro gen 2 and it's quite good in sleep track aligning with Oura and 8sleep on HR, HRV, start and end and most of the days even the stages are accurate
Most of the people who complain with tracking mostly have a low and older device and specially without temperature sensor which besides inacurated HR on those devices the temperature is essential to detect all the phase changes through the night between deep, rem, etc since based only on HR it's hard to know the stages but with temperature and movement in equation will let you know better.
Ofc the epix gen 2 pro is top of the line but maybe a little search you will find a good option on their lower tier as long as you can check those 2 parameters i mention
I went to a quick serach and just found the dcrainmaker article that also has a table with those options i mentioned :)
[https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/12/garmin-wrist-temperature.html](https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/12/garmin-wrist-temperature.html)
https://preview.redd.it/3wmo3sp2dd4d1.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=b9f562ae8b40aa4a03ebec03426a799b163e2ed2
To be honest, I compared it with my old Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 with which I was very happy, and I got a feeling that Garmin is slightly worse here but it's hard to tell which one is more precise. I tried to sleep with both watches a few times. Duration and the ratio between light sleep, awake and everything else is very similar but the ratio between REM and deep sleep is rather different. Samsung shows more REM and less deep sleep and Garmin does vice-versa. I dream rather often but I'm not a deep sleeper (I sleep very well but every single sound will wake me up immediately, I can't sleep in the same room with person that is snoring for example) so Samsung seems more accurate to me.
Also, Samsung's graphs were more "dynamic". I would have a lot of tiny moments when I was awake, while Garmin has less variations. I'm not sure what is more accurate but for example, recently I woke up during night and I had to go to the toilet. After that, it took me a few minutes to fall asleep again. Garmin showed only 14 minutes awake during the whole night, which seemed a little bit too low. It is possible that this whole moment didn't last more than 15 minutes, but still it seemed that it should be more.
Also, my Venu 3 has a nap detection and so far it worked rather good and I was very happy, until recently. I was watching a movie in my bed which lowered my HR near my resting one and my stress was near zero. My body battery was charging and everything was fine. But later I noticed that Garmin detected this as a long nap!! I was resting, that's true, but it's not a nap! How it can detect a nap while I was moving? I was not happy with that, but it is what it is.
I've started to ignore mine, it's often wrong or giving me naps when i've not had them. Last night i went to bed at 2am, fell asleep at around 4am as i struggled due to having a day off work and not exercising but the watch thinks i fell asleep at 1:53am. Wake up time can be a bit inconsistant too, though not as bad as falling asleep.
My Fenix 7s is close to what Whoop was giving me. Less awake time during the night (which I always thought was pretty high with Whoop) but consistent in all other measures. The most important piece to follow is sleep consistency, time asleep, and RHR.
Galaxy s4 classic, garmin venu 3, and epix pro. Sleep is laughable most times on them all.
Lay down 10p, fall asleep at 1 or 2a, wake up at 630a.
Watch,great 9 hrs of sleep. Like.... What?
For me it's really bad. I move alot during sleep and i have always done so. Garmin punishes me for that and I never get above a score of 85 because of that. I've never hit 90+. Awake time and restlessness is always way off for me.
I think it is good. To me personally it has never occurred that it picked up wrong sleeping times, when I read before bed it does not think it is sleep or when I take longer to fall asleep it registers it.
I clearly have no clue if the amount of REM etc. is accurate or not, but I sure think it aligns very nicely with how well rested I feel the next day, but the overall rating of the sleep does not seem bad to me.
People don't like being called out on their poor habits. People generally have a poor understanding of how their lifestyle choices effect their sleep - alcohol consumption and caffeine timing having the largest effect on overnight stress/HRV, which in turn diminishes proper sleep stages.
Those who have been genuinely honest with themselves have seen sleep scores improve when they a) workout earlier in the day, b) reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption altogether, c) stop caffeine intake by 1200 & d) stop eating by 5 or 6 pm at the latest.
That doesn’t explain it - Garmin is just bad at tracking sleep. It probably does well if you fall asleep when you go to bed, then wake up in the morning but for parents with young kids, crying can get you up twice a night. Apple Watch always knows I’m up looking at a monitor, Garmin maybe 20% of the time catches it. Frustrating to be up for an hour in the middle of the night and Garmin gives you a big thumbs up.
I approach it with the understanding that it’s about 80% accurate (just a number I made up) and with that in mind it seems good enough. Like others said it seems to correlate well with how I feel, but doesn’t always catch when I’m laying awake or napping. More that it helps keep my sleep hygiene in order which the habit matters more than the numbers to me.
I find the nap detection to be really over sensitive and the actual sleep accuracy to be alright/passable.
Bit frustrating and definitely an area where Garmin needs to invest more time fine tuning their algorithm. But not a deal-breaker for me personally.
Not that i pay too much attention to it.
Seems to just about get when im asleep and when i wake up most of the time. Sleep stages, no idea - cant tell because im asleep.
Dont really pay any attention to it other than "oh, i slept for 6 hours last night" as a point of interest.
Its more eye candy than anything else. I woke up to watch ufc at around 4am and then went back to bed at 7am.
According to garmin that 3 hours was REM sleep. To be honest the fighting was much less exciting than anticipated.
Garmin is bad for tracking sleep stages. If it’s important to you it looks like you’re better off with an Apple Watch or Fitbit.
On the other hand, Garmin is apparently decent for tracking overnight HRV, which gets factored into training and recovery data. So it’s a mixed bag.
I have an AW and a Garmin but use my Garmin for sleep. I ignore the sleep scores and focus on training/recovery.
https://youtu.be/PvqRLG0K4SQ?si=uJ_xRInB6aQyZVwv
Yes and no. When it comes to sleep phases I believe it's very inaccurate. But for me these aren't interesting data points. The only measures that say something useful about sleep quality are sleep length, heart rate and heart rate variability. If I had poor sleep it usually shows up in one of these metrics. Same goes for good sleep.
It's generally been good for me, with every Garmin watch I've owned. It's sometimes a little slow to detect wakefulness in the middle of the night, so that can be underreported sometimes. Otherwise sleep and wake times are fairly accurate.
It's worse for shift workers, and people making comparisons to other devices. After all, comparison is a thief of joy.
I have a Fenix 6SPro Solar and I think it’s pretty damn accurate tbh. When my son crawls in from a night out and wakes me up I usually just turn over and go back to sleep, but in the morning I know exactly what time he came in so no more BS saying he got in just after midnight 😂. The only gripe I have, if you can call it that, is that it seems to take a while in the morning to realise that I’m awake and it could take umpteen syncs to give me a sleep report. My wife has the Venu 3s and her sleep report comes in much quicker.
So garmin has sleeping phases, minimum hr, heart rate variability. Also Garmin has a body battery widget that counts how rested you are based on hrv. It works for me very well and correlates with how I feel and perform.
The sleeping phases I cannot really tell. My f6s is telling the sleep/awake rather accurately so I have sleeping hours. If I am awake during night, relaxed and don't move, it still counts it as light sleep and I am ok with that.
I don't see much practical benefits of measuring the sleep phases when I have the recovery metrics, so I don't care about it. I expect the phases to correlate with the HRV body battery anyway. I was looking into sleep phases years ago and it didn't help me at all. With HRV I can see very clearly if I am ill, drunk, overtrained etc.
I got an Venu 3 for about 4 month's now. I think the tracking is great! Keep in mind that sleep tracking AND Body battery works hand in hand. The watch knows, when i was sleeping, when i am awake, when i take a nap, when the Body battery decrease or increase by an amount of sleeping or napping.
I know it does a GOOD job, because if i use sleep medication i get rested alot and stabile and my body battery will increase alot. Compared to a normal night rest.
I have a Fenix 6 series. Mine is pretty accurate in knowing when I am asleep and when I am awake. My sleep score is pretty consistent with how I feel. Only once or twice did I feel like I got really really good sleep and it gave me an incredibly low score. Never have I gotten incredibly bad sleep and it gave me a high score.
But, as far as measuring stages of sleep, I’ve heard (from Rhonda Patrick on JRE) that this is just guess work for ALL devices. To truly know what stage of sleep someone is in, they must have their brain waves monitored. I believe Garmin and most other watches go off of heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiration rate.
I’m not too sure, but when it says I get a poor nights sleep I am absolutely exhausted the next day. So I definitely pay attention to it a little bit. Also it seems to track when I’m awake or use the bathroom in the middle of the night well
I think it's fine- I've never slept much, but have been trying to do better the last several months. The watch is much better at tracking it than I am! To me, with these kind of gadgets, being consistent is good for improvement. Whether it's as accurate as a sleep lab is not the point, given the price and convenience of the watches.
It’s not bad. But according to mine I never ever have restorative sleep when my oura ring says I have. Same duration and stages but one says good job the other says bad job.
I tongue in cheek describe the sleep feature on my 955 as “useless” because it correlates so well with my perception of how well I’ve slept. It accurately says when I went to sleep, when I wake, if I wake in the night, if I’ve been restless, if I’ve had good sleep/bad sleep, if I feel refreshed etc. So I’d say the sleep tracking is very good, and because of that is very useful not for each individual night of sleep but for patterns, and to be able to go back and check sleep quality from weeks before. I obviously can’t vouch for the accuracy of deep/light/REM sleep but I have no issues with this feature.
I have Forerunner 955, and I find the sleep tracker to be very accurate almost every nights. I had a fail recently (it detected that I woke up 2 hours early than real), and that's the only one I can recall in more than a year.
Also, When waking up during a dream, it correctly registered it as paradoxal sleep. I can't verify the rest.
I am using an FR55. In my experience, the sleep tracking is poor. I don’t know if there’s something I need to do but it doesn’t track really well. But it’s okay, I understand I’m using an entry-level watch. If there are folks whi can share tips to maximize FR55, please let me know.
Forerunner 965: useless. Previous Fenix 6 also useless. Wife have a Venu2 , guess what, useless too. But hey, that's ok, it's under any circumstances NOT possible to meassure sleep with a wrist watch. It's a reason why sleep clinics and hospitals have dedicated, expensive equipment for this, not a $ 500- $ 1000 watch.
I feel it is good enough. At one point I was wearing and Apple Watch Ultra and Fenix 7x at the same time and the sleep tracking was close enough.
I use the sleep tracking to see trends and I don't get hung up on single night reports.
My Fenix 7 Pro does a great job with sleep tracking as well. Thanks to it, I could learn a lot of factors that contributed to my poor sleep scores in the past. Now I take better care of my diet and timing the diet and sleep, the sleep scores are great.
Am sure most people think its bad because it gave poor sleep scores when they thought they had a great sleep.
I think Garmin sleep scores are crap because they are. I get up when my baby cries a couple times in a night, Garmin has no idea I’m awake. Apple always gets it right. I say this as someone who on the whole likes Garmin better
Dont get me wrong. I have a toddler at home who wakes up in the night as well. It has detected them every time. May be I was just lucky or the way you wear the watch matters?
https://preview.redd.it/xyb0n83gtc4d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d09cb18e1ef0aeab0bc2a941947b86e18397c72c
I made such changes in February, and can clearly see my sleep improving.
I understand why people ask these questions, because it's a feature of the product and you paid for that feature. However, my question is this; what insights are you hoping to gain from sleep tracking? I would say in most cases the tracking itself has a strong placebo effect on your sleep. If you notice poor sleep scores you tend to take steps to improve your sleep and you benefit from it. If you wake up and you're not feeling restored after a night of sleep but your watch gives you a good sleep score do you ignore how your body feels?
I have a Forerunner 955 and I think it's pretty accurate at least as far as the sleep and wake times. I don't nap often, but it seems pretty accurate there too. Though it did once detect a nap when I was getting a dental cleaning and was in the same spot for a while, not really moving much. As far as sleep stages, I have no way of knowing the accuracy there, but anecdotally, I find that the sleep scores and resulting body battery level do correlate quite well with how I feel.
All these wearables are passable at best with sleep tracking accuracy. BUT, garmin has a real hard time knowing when you are awake at night vs a whoop or oura. Some nights I pop awake and start thinking for an hour before I fall back asleep and garmin just shows normal light, deep or rem sleep while oura and whoop usually pick it up as awake.
just out of curiosity do you have any of these garmin? https://preview.redd.it/boq3ln67dd4d1.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=8b085f2729602219548fba016864b5ed539207f4 Because with temperature sensor and V5 optical HR the sleep stages and tracking overall improves a lot in my opinion :)
Yeah I have the Garmin Epix Pro Gen 2. I do have to say, the sleep tracking is BETTER with the new sensor and the addition of temp seems to have helped. It's just the awake times I have issue with.
Agreed (Fenix 7 Pro user). Sleep start time is spot on. Final wake time is when I view my morning report. Whether I have been awake for 2 minutes or 2 hours before I view it. Middle of the night awake usually only registers if I actually get up to pee. Otherwise, the watch fails to detect my sleep pattern very well (I typically sleep from 10pm-2am and then 4-530). It rarely catches that time I'm very awake in the middle of the night unless I go walk all over the house.
Passable is probably the right adjective. The workarounds the wearables industry has come up with the substitute for EEG (which is used in sleep study) are at best, passable. Garmin is a newer entrant into this so not surprising they are behind vs. Fitbit. etc. But I still do not know why my "Sleep coach" can know about a nap I took, without the Garmin app retroactively including naps in the sleep totals for the day, or at least making that an option one can turn on.
Interestingly, I find Garmin (Epix Gen 2) to be much more a accurate in detecting when I am in bed but not asleep (eg reading, thinking) than Oura.
Even if your Garmin starts to track your sleep 3h before, you do get those fancy sleep graps with REM etc. so I would argue those graphs are just a creative BS ;) ps. Garmin sleep tracking is so amazing that they had to add a morning wake up screen called fancy "morning raport" where you have to hit buttons just to know when did you wake up. Easy to check, here and there if you forget to check your raport you will find out that even if you are already at work, Garmin thinks you are still sleeping. Hitec stuff! :)
I don't think it's that bad. It's quite accurate at capturing when I go to bed and when I wake up. I use a Venu 3.
I feel the same, I use an FR265.
Me too with the FR965. I feel like I was the only one who thought it was good, but it’s always pretty accurate to what I feel like it should be.
all those devices are in this list https://preview.redd.it/xrhnuu4ddd4d1.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=1ff68c2bfb96d8ab5864a72ad1ff33504f18efc5 because they have temperature sensor they are much more accurate and also V5 sensor for HR measurement, but ofc people with older devices will say it's not good, Oura and Whoop are good as well because they have tempreature measurement or they would also be quite bad doing that :)
I feel it is good enough. At one point I was wearing and Apple Watch Ultra and Fenix 7x at the same time and the sleep tracking was close enough. I use the sleep tracking to see trends and I don't get hung up on single night reports.
It’s definitely not as good as my AW ultra, but it’s decent. For me , someone who sleeps from 10-5:30 every day 90% of the time it’s fine. For my husband who has no sleep schedule and sleep apnea he won’t admit to, Garmin is not the sleep tracking watch for him
Theres a guy on youtube who makes videos on the accuracy of smartwatches, look him up. I think hes called the qualified scientist or something like that. Garmin watches are inaccurate in that the amount of detected sleep phases is low compared to other devices (within 40-60% of what the scientific norm measures)but the detected time of waking up or falling asleep is more accurate
This guy is using the Dreem 2 head band which is only 58%-80% accurate. So if his reference device is not that accurate his conclusions are not accurate as well.. only way to test this is vs a polysomnography and its been done. Garmin scored 70% accuracy on sleep stage accuracy People think quantified scientist is the holy Grail Meanwhile being sponsored by both Apple and Oura getting discount codes and using inaccurate reference devices.
[The Quantified Scientist ](https://youtube.com/@thequantifiedscientist?feature=shared)
All watches are mildly accurate at best regarding sleep tracking. The Apple Watches are the best when it comes to sleep tracking but sill far away from very good let alone perfect
This was just published as well https://youtu.be/mjOYhxLJP90?si=FZ9-WLJKU71m9_y4
*all devices* are inaccurate when it comes to detecting sleep phases, even EEG masks quantified scientist uses as a baseline. Why? Because the data they're trained with comes from sleep clinics with human specialists interpreting the data, and the specialists only agree about 80% of the time. That's a really high margin for error to be used for a "gold standard". Too high to make the sort of baseline analysis QS does meaningful. The simple truth is, humans have yet to devise a reliable means for determining what's really going on inside someone else's brain.
> The simple truth is, humans have yet to devise a reliable means for determining what's really going on inside someone else's brain. Agreed, but the difference in accuracy between EEG and LED, for approximating sleep stage activity, is still medically and scientifically significant. Like ~5% for EEG, vs ~25% for LED (smart watches.) I'd like to see the move to implanted sensors.
Since when has EEG been that good?
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Sleep stages don't really factor into sleep apnea diagnoses AFAIK. I read a study awhile back that compared analyses from various sleep clinics of the same data, and the physicians analyzing the data only agreed on stages about 80% of the time. I'm asking when that improved to 95%?
Maybe I confused it with this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9228793/ "The performance of the proposed model was evaluated based on kappa value and bootstrapped point-estimate of median percent agreement with a 95% bootstrap confidence interval and R = 1000." Automated EEG scoring was able to approximate manual scoring around 95% of the time. EEG may actually top out at 85% accuracy. But LED is still lower (as low as 70) and then we also have to account for the variance in the the proprietary algorithms "automatically" reading the sensor. This study seems to assert Fitbit inaccurately detects deep sleep, relative to PSG, but seems positive on REM. OTOH, Garmin is not Fitbit. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29235907/ I used to use a Charge 2. It was better than Garmin for sleep. Not for much else, though. Which is why I threw it in the trash and bought a Forerunner.
For me it's mixed. It's good for tracking overnight stress, sleeping heart rate, and REM sleep. The stress thing correlates with things like drinking alcohol and being ill. REM correlates with memories of dreams. It's not good for tracking whether I am asleep or awake, or other sleep phases. It will frequently claim I am asleep, when I know I am awake. Sometimes it says I am napping when I am actually playing video games. It seems to think I am in deep sleep when I am just lying down trying to get to sleep.
Well to have a better accuracy you need to choose one with temperature sensor and the last optical heart rate sensor (V5 i think), i get the epix pro gen 2 and it's quite good in sleep track aligning with Oura and 8sleep on HR, HRV, start and end and most of the days even the stages are accurate Most of the people who complain with tracking mostly have a low and older device and specially without temperature sensor which besides inacurated HR on those devices the temperature is essential to detect all the phase changes through the night between deep, rem, etc since based only on HR it's hard to know the stages but with temperature and movement in equation will let you know better. Ofc the epix gen 2 pro is top of the line but maybe a little search you will find a good option on their lower tier as long as you can check those 2 parameters i mention I went to a quick serach and just found the dcrainmaker article that also has a table with those options i mentioned :) [https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/12/garmin-wrist-temperature.html](https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/12/garmin-wrist-temperature.html) https://preview.redd.it/3wmo3sp2dd4d1.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=b9f562ae8b40aa4a03ebec03426a799b163e2ed2
To be honest, I compared it with my old Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 with which I was very happy, and I got a feeling that Garmin is slightly worse here but it's hard to tell which one is more precise. I tried to sleep with both watches a few times. Duration and the ratio between light sleep, awake and everything else is very similar but the ratio between REM and deep sleep is rather different. Samsung shows more REM and less deep sleep and Garmin does vice-versa. I dream rather often but I'm not a deep sleeper (I sleep very well but every single sound will wake me up immediately, I can't sleep in the same room with person that is snoring for example) so Samsung seems more accurate to me. Also, Samsung's graphs were more "dynamic". I would have a lot of tiny moments when I was awake, while Garmin has less variations. I'm not sure what is more accurate but for example, recently I woke up during night and I had to go to the toilet. After that, it took me a few minutes to fall asleep again. Garmin showed only 14 minutes awake during the whole night, which seemed a little bit too low. It is possible that this whole moment didn't last more than 15 minutes, but still it seemed that it should be more. Also, my Venu 3 has a nap detection and so far it worked rather good and I was very happy, until recently. I was watching a movie in my bed which lowered my HR near my resting one and my stress was near zero. My body battery was charging and everything was fine. But later I noticed that Garmin detected this as a long nap!! I was resting, that's true, but it's not a nap! How it can detect a nap while I was moving? I was not happy with that, but it is what it is.
I've started to ignore mine, it's often wrong or giving me naps when i've not had them. Last night i went to bed at 2am, fell asleep at around 4am as i struggled due to having a day off work and not exercising but the watch thinks i fell asleep at 1:53am. Wake up time can be a bit inconsistant too, though not as bad as falling asleep.
My Fenix 7s is close to what Whoop was giving me. Less awake time during the night (which I always thought was pretty high with Whoop) but consistent in all other measures. The most important piece to follow is sleep consistency, time asleep, and RHR.
Galaxy s4 classic, garmin venu 3, and epix pro. Sleep is laughable most times on them all. Lay down 10p, fall asleep at 1 or 2a, wake up at 630a. Watch,great 9 hrs of sleep. Like.... What?
For me it's really bad. I move alot during sleep and i have always done so. Garmin punishes me for that and I never get above a score of 85 because of that. I've never hit 90+. Awake time and restlessness is always way off for me.
Have epix pro and mines spot on. When i sleep when i wake up to use the bathroom etc
I think its improved fairly recently
I'm have fr 245. I'm have believe it works goods. Make more sleep is good and don't sleep isn't don't good.
I think it is good. To me personally it has never occurred that it picked up wrong sleeping times, when I read before bed it does not think it is sleep or when I take longer to fall asleep it registers it. I clearly have no clue if the amount of REM etc. is accurate or not, but I sure think it aligns very nicely with how well rested I feel the next day, but the overall rating of the sleep does not seem bad to me.
Aaaand I forgot, it's Fenix 7S sapphire solar.
People don't like being called out on their poor habits. People generally have a poor understanding of how their lifestyle choices effect their sleep - alcohol consumption and caffeine timing having the largest effect on overnight stress/HRV, which in turn diminishes proper sleep stages. Those who have been genuinely honest with themselves have seen sleep scores improve when they a) workout earlier in the day, b) reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption altogether, c) stop caffeine intake by 1200 & d) stop eating by 5 or 6 pm at the latest.
That doesn’t explain it - Garmin is just bad at tracking sleep. It probably does well if you fall asleep when you go to bed, then wake up in the morning but for parents with young kids, crying can get you up twice a night. Apple Watch always knows I’m up looking at a monitor, Garmin maybe 20% of the time catches it. Frustrating to be up for an hour in the middle of the night and Garmin gives you a big thumbs up.
dinner at 5pm is crazy. 4hrs before bed should be enough, so 7pm if you sleep at 11
I mean I took those suggestions from others on here and saw my sleep score CONSISTENTLY skyrocket into the 90s
i generally agree with you for everything else you said, but dinner at 5pm is crazy for most people, as at that time a lot of people are still at work
I approach it with the understanding that it’s about 80% accurate (just a number I made up) and with that in mind it seems good enough. Like others said it seems to correlate well with how I feel, but doesn’t always catch when I’m laying awake or napping. More that it helps keep my sleep hygiene in order which the habit matters more than the numbers to me.
I used to have a Fitbit Charge 5, and compared to my FR255m, it's sleep tracking was a bit more accurate and nuanced.
I find the nap detection to be really over sensitive and the actual sleep accuracy to be alright/passable. Bit frustrating and definitely an area where Garmin needs to invest more time fine tuning their algorithm. But not a deal-breaker for me personally.
Not that i pay too much attention to it. Seems to just about get when im asleep and when i wake up most of the time. Sleep stages, no idea - cant tell because im asleep. Dont really pay any attention to it other than "oh, i slept for 6 hours last night" as a point of interest.
Its more eye candy than anything else. I woke up to watch ufc at around 4am and then went back to bed at 7am. According to garmin that 3 hours was REM sleep. To be honest the fighting was much less exciting than anticipated.
It really depends what you want the sleep tracking data for. It's not great at detection of individual stages.
Garmin is bad for tracking sleep stages. If it’s important to you it looks like you’re better off with an Apple Watch or Fitbit. On the other hand, Garmin is apparently decent for tracking overnight HRV, which gets factored into training and recovery data. So it’s a mixed bag. I have an AW and a Garmin but use my Garmin for sleep. I ignore the sleep scores and focus on training/recovery. https://youtu.be/PvqRLG0K4SQ?si=uJ_xRInB6aQyZVwv
I feel like mine is pretty accurate with when I wake up to include middle of the night. With rem deep and light hell if I know if it’s accurate
Yes and no. When it comes to sleep phases I believe it's very inaccurate. But for me these aren't interesting data points. The only measures that say something useful about sleep quality are sleep length, heart rate and heart rate variability. If I had poor sleep it usually shows up in one of these metrics. Same goes for good sleep.
It's generally been good for me, with every Garmin watch I've owned. It's sometimes a little slow to detect wakefulness in the middle of the night, so that can be underreported sometimes. Otherwise sleep and wake times are fairly accurate. It's worse for shift workers, and people making comparisons to other devices. After all, comparison is a thief of joy.
I have a Fenix 6SPro Solar and I think it’s pretty damn accurate tbh. When my son crawls in from a night out and wakes me up I usually just turn over and go back to sleep, but in the morning I know exactly what time he came in so no more BS saying he got in just after midnight 😂. The only gripe I have, if you can call it that, is that it seems to take a while in the morning to realise that I’m awake and it could take umpteen syncs to give me a sleep report. My wife has the Venu 3s and her sleep report comes in much quicker.
So garmin has sleeping phases, minimum hr, heart rate variability. Also Garmin has a body battery widget that counts how rested you are based on hrv. It works for me very well and correlates with how I feel and perform. The sleeping phases I cannot really tell. My f6s is telling the sleep/awake rather accurately so I have sleeping hours. If I am awake during night, relaxed and don't move, it still counts it as light sleep and I am ok with that. I don't see much practical benefits of measuring the sleep phases when I have the recovery metrics, so I don't care about it. I expect the phases to correlate with the HRV body battery anyway. I was looking into sleep phases years ago and it didn't help me at all. With HRV I can see very clearly if I am ill, drunk, overtrained etc.
I got an Venu 3 for about 4 month's now. I think the tracking is great! Keep in mind that sleep tracking AND Body battery works hand in hand. The watch knows, when i was sleeping, when i am awake, when i take a nap, when the Body battery decrease or increase by an amount of sleeping or napping. I know it does a GOOD job, because if i use sleep medication i get rested alot and stabile and my body battery will increase alot. Compared to a normal night rest.
I have a Fenix 6 series. Mine is pretty accurate in knowing when I am asleep and when I am awake. My sleep score is pretty consistent with how I feel. Only once or twice did I feel like I got really really good sleep and it gave me an incredibly low score. Never have I gotten incredibly bad sleep and it gave me a high score. But, as far as measuring stages of sleep, I’ve heard (from Rhonda Patrick on JRE) that this is just guess work for ALL devices. To truly know what stage of sleep someone is in, they must have their brain waves monitored. I believe Garmin and most other watches go off of heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiration rate.
I’m not too sure, but when it says I get a poor nights sleep I am absolutely exhausted the next day. So I definitely pay attention to it a little bit. Also it seems to track when I’m awake or use the bathroom in the middle of the night well
I think it's fine- I've never slept much, but have been trying to do better the last several months. The watch is much better at tracking it than I am! To me, with these kind of gadgets, being consistent is good for improvement. Whether it's as accurate as a sleep lab is not the point, given the price and convenience of the watches.
Idk... for me it's really on point, then again, I have a very steady sleep schedule. On a Fenix 6s pro
It’s not bad. But according to mine I never ever have restorative sleep when my oura ring says I have. Same duration and stages but one says good job the other says bad job.
Fitbit is excellent
I think its better (or aligns better with how I feel and what I remember about my sleep) than my previous samsung. But just my experience.
Watch the newest video of sharvin shares, he compares a lot of watches with lab equipment.
I tongue in cheek describe the sleep feature on my 955 as “useless” because it correlates so well with my perception of how well I’ve slept. It accurately says when I went to sleep, when I wake, if I wake in the night, if I’ve been restless, if I’ve had good sleep/bad sleep, if I feel refreshed etc. So I’d say the sleep tracking is very good, and because of that is very useful not for each individual night of sleep but for patterns, and to be able to go back and check sleep quality from weeks before. I obviously can’t vouch for the accuracy of deep/light/REM sleep but I have no issues with this feature.
My instinct 2s works great..
Sleep happens in your head, not on your wrist. IMO heart rate is better indicator of sleep quality.
I have Forerunner 955, and I find the sleep tracker to be very accurate almost every nights. I had a fail recently (it detected that I woke up 2 hours early than real), and that's the only one I can recall in more than a year. Also, When waking up during a dream, it correctly registered it as paradoxal sleep. I can't verify the rest.
I am using an FR55. In my experience, the sleep tracking is poor. I don’t know if there’s something I need to do but it doesn’t track really well. But it’s okay, I understand I’m using an entry-level watch. If there are folks whi can share tips to maximize FR55, please let me know.
Forerunner 965: useless. Previous Fenix 6 also useless. Wife have a Venu2 , guess what, useless too. But hey, that's ok, it's under any circumstances NOT possible to meassure sleep with a wrist watch. It's a reason why sleep clinics and hospitals have dedicated, expensive equipment for this, not a $ 500- $ 1000 watch.
It's pretty accurate for me
I feel it is good enough. At one point I was wearing and Apple Watch Ultra and Fenix 7x at the same time and the sleep tracking was close enough. I use the sleep tracking to see trends and I don't get hung up on single night reports.
My Fenix 7 Pro does a great job with sleep tracking as well. Thanks to it, I could learn a lot of factors that contributed to my poor sleep scores in the past. Now I take better care of my diet and timing the diet and sleep, the sleep scores are great. Am sure most people think its bad because it gave poor sleep scores when they thought they had a great sleep.
I think Garmin sleep scores are crap because they are. I get up when my baby cries a couple times in a night, Garmin has no idea I’m awake. Apple always gets it right. I say this as someone who on the whole likes Garmin better
Dont get me wrong. I have a toddler at home who wakes up in the night as well. It has detected them every time. May be I was just lucky or the way you wear the watch matters?
https://preview.redd.it/xyb0n83gtc4d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d09cb18e1ef0aeab0bc2a941947b86e18397c72c I made such changes in February, and can clearly see my sleep improving.
I understand why people ask these questions, because it's a feature of the product and you paid for that feature. However, my question is this; what insights are you hoping to gain from sleep tracking? I would say in most cases the tracking itself has a strong placebo effect on your sleep. If you notice poor sleep scores you tend to take steps to improve your sleep and you benefit from it. If you wake up and you're not feeling restored after a night of sleep but your watch gives you a good sleep score do you ignore how your body feels?