Me: 🥱bit tired this morning a couple hours more sleep would have been nice. Do I go for a second coffee?

Apple Watch: *ding* Your Sleep Score was really high last night!

Me: 😒 ... not helping!

#appleWatch #sleepScore #coffee

Apple’s Sleep Score algorithm needs a tweak

I’ve found it quite satisfying to track my sleep with my Apple Watch (Series 10). The feature works pretty well, and the watch itself is very easily charged from, say, 50% up to 90+% in my “reading time”, which is between getting into bed and turning off my Kindle e-reader. That 20 minutes or so is the only time the watch needs to spend on the charger.

There are three measures that make up the sleep score: duration, “bedtime”, and interruptions. As a man of a certain age, those interruptions are usually trips to the toilet in the middle of the night, but they can also be those occasions when you wake up and struggle to get back to sleep.

As I’ve said before, since I retired, my sleep has been much, much better. I think, in the main, this is because when I do wake up at 04:00 or 04:30, which is something that happened for years, I can now usually get back to sleep for a bit—whereas in the days of employment, I could never do that, knowing that I had to get up for work.

The Apple Health app gives you a second visualisation of your sleep, which is something probably familiar to Fitbit users etc. This is based on breathing and heart rate, and tells you how much time you spend in each phase of sleep. Expect two or three “deep sleep” intervals, usually early in the night, and several REM sleep intervals, as well as those stretches of mid-blue “core” sleep. The disappointing orange blobs are periods of being awake. It’s not so bad when those blobs are short, but when they’re lengthy, you’ve probably had a rough night.

It all works rather well, except when it doesn’t. If I wake up after 7 hours plus of sleep and I’ve had two or three “deep sleep” intervals, I usually feel well rested. But, ironically, sometimes you sleep so well that, um, well. You forget to put your Apple Watch on, and fall asleep without it.

At which point, the watch will often report a poor night, when it was nothing of the kind. What’s the difference between 4 and 5 above, 10th and 8th January? An hour of sleep? Not actually. On 10th January, I was unconscious from about 11 pm to 1 am, and I sleepily donned the watch after what was probably a decent chunk of deep sleep.

Last night, I was unconscious within seconds of putting my kindle down and thinking about putting the watch on, and in the end didn’t put it on until about 04:30. Which is where the “Very Low” sleep score comes from above. Only it wasn’t very low at all. I slept from about 23:30 to 07:20 with barely any interruptions.

What’s the solution? I think, if your watch is only activated in the middle of the night, it should prompt you to over-ride the sleep score. And even if it can’t do that, you should be able to overwrite the data in some way with a manual entry. Does it matter? Maybe not, but long-term, you might be monitoring your average time asleep (perhaps in conjunction with a doctor), and a night (or several) of 2h 53 minutes “sleep” is going to skew your average.

In all of the graphics above, I had nights that were pretty similar. Probably around 7 hours, but only for one of them did I manage to put the watch on at the very beginning of the night. So “26” and “64” and “88” were all actually closer to “88”.

#Apple #AppleWatch #Health #insomnia #mentalHealth #sleep #SleepScore #wellness

My two-hour wake period was unintentional, but knowing that for most of human history (pre-industrialisation) us humans slept in two short bursts instead of through the night, I feel that this “Interruptions” #SleepScore is unfair. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep

#AppleHealth #Sleep

Galaxy Watch: punteggi del sonno vicini alla perfezione
#Bug #GalaxyWatch #MonitoraggioSonno #Salute #Samsung #SamsungHealth #SleepScore #Smartwatch #TechNews #Tecnologia #WearOS #Wearable

https://www.ceotech.it/galaxy-watch-punteggi-del-sonno-vicini-alla-perfezione/

Discover how Apple Watch Sleep Score helps track your rest, compare it with other sleep apps, and learn simple ways to improve your sleep quality.

#AppleWatch #SleepScore #BetterSleep #SleepTracking #HealthyLiving #AppleWatchTips #SleepWell

https://www.originalmacguy.com/tired-of-poor-sleep-apple-watch-sleep-score-can-help/

Who wears their Apple Watch in bed? When do you charge it if so?

Geniunely curious as my old Series 3 needs recharging every night and I'm wondering how much the new Sleep Score will be used.

#AppleWatch #SleepScore