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Wrist watches can't really detect sleep stages. That requires at least an EEG to do reliably. The best they can do is maybe distinguish between sleeping vs awak

Wrist watches can't really detect sleep stages. That requires at least an EEG to do reliably. The best they can do is maybe distinguish between sleeping vs awake. The only consumer device with an EEG is the Zeo, unfortunately they went bankrupt and people are unable to distinguish the flukes from the real ones. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25991187/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25991187/

cassianoleal 3y ago
There was the Dreem 2 as well but they have also ended production.
magicalhippo 3y ago
Heh my SO just showed me her Garmin-something tracker log the other day, and it showed her having an hour of deep sleep when she'd been lying on the couch watching TV. It's also showing various sleep stages whens he knows she's been awake, trying to sleep.
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > It's also showing various sleep stages whens he knows she's been awake, trying to sleep. To be fair, people actually aren't that great at detecting when they (or others) are really sleeping. Especially for one's self, it's common to believe that you spent more of the night tossing and turning than you really did, when in reality you actually got some light sleep sprinkled in those periods. That said, consumer-grade wearable devices are demonstrably not great at this either.
- drewg123 3y ago
  I love Garmin watches for many reasons, but their sleep tracking is horrible. Even my ancient MS Band did a better job than my Garmin Fenix 6
  - jurassicfoxy 3y ago
    It's pretty awful. Though they seem to be capable of detecting terrible sleep, at least. Gotta love a 40 sleep score night.
    - drewg123 3y ago
      Agreed. But it can't tell if I'm jet-lagged and I wake up 3 hours into my sleep at 2:30 am and lay there still, yet unable to get back to sleep. That is sometimes an 80 sleep score night, when really it should be a 40.
  - oraphalous 3y ago
    I got a epix 2 pro which has their new heart rate tech. It tracks my sleep very reliably.
- nottorp 3y ago
  > it showed her having an hour of deep sleep when she'd been lying on the couch watching TV The Garmin may be right considering the quality of TV... even if she had her eyes open...
- ornornor 3y ago
  Same here. Sleep tracking is mediocre at best. Some nights I’ve spent hours wide awake but lying down, the watch thinks I was awake for 20 min. Or when I wake up in the morning and read a book or scroll the phone to not wake anyone else up, the watch will usually log it as REM. But it never showed any naps as actual sleeping time. Until I saw your comment I thought that the garmin would only log sleep overnight and never during the day. Did you have to enable something for it to log naps?
KennyBlanken 3y ago
That study is nearly ten years old and almost certainly not relevant anymore. The Basis Peak did a good job at tracking sleep but they got bought up and killed off by Intel for god knows what reason. The Peak also did automatic activity detection and it was quite good at it. Basis also had hands-down the best visualization of activity and sleep trends, and was the only watch at the time to do full time HRM. They claimed the Peak watches were a fire risk and recalled them, probably to have a reason to get rid of all the back end infrastructure. Garmin still can't reliably autodetect biking and its sleep tracking is pretty terrible, too.
PrairieFire 3y ago
I miss the Zeo. The app would still work locally long after they shut the backend down, until there just was no more aftermarket / eBay supply of their unique silver coated contact padded headbands that actually did the brainwave monitoring. I do find the Apple Watch Ultra seems to be close to at least being in the ballpark in terms of stage and duration accuracy as its output is comparable to what I last got with Zeo, albeit 10 years ago.
verticalscaler 3y ago
This review channel begs to differ: https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist/videos https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist/videos He very throughly compares countless models with a Polar H10 strap. Some come close enough.
CharlesW 3y ago
> Wrist watches can't really detect sleep stages. As someone else noted, the paper you linked to is from 2015. Apple Watch couldn't do it until watchOS 9 (2022, 7 years later), but can now do this pretty reliably. You might find the "Algorithm Development and Validation" section of this whitepaper interesting: https://www.apple.com/healthcare/docs/site/Estimating_Sleep_Stages_from_Apple_Watch_Sept_2023.pdf https://www.apple.com/healthcare/docs/site/Estimating_Sleep_...
- pkoird 3y ago
  Thanks for linking this. I always did wonder how they did it. From a cursory read, it looks like the basic approach is to collect accelerometer data and train it to predict ground truth labels generated via a consumer EEG device. Not sure if each epochs (30s) were considered iids. I'd assume that the overall sequence of activity would be much more informative than a single 30s activity considered independently.
  - cj 3y ago
    Sometimes at work I’m concentrating so hard my Apple Watch logs a sleep session… Definitely not 100% accurate but as someone who checks their sleep log (and time in each stage using the Pillow app) daily, it seems pretty accurate and I can correlate how I feel on a given day back to that day’s sleep report with pretty good correlation. Definitely not perfect but better than nothing. If you’ve ever been on medication that suppresses REM sleep, Apple Watch detects REM rebound very clearly.
    - pkoird 3y ago
      I won't be surprised. The accelerometers seem to be pretty sensitive. Enough to measure any variations in heart rates and breathing patterns which are likely highly correlated with sleep patterns.
    - astrange 3y ago
      I didn't think it tracked sleep unless you put it into Sleep mode explicitly.
pedalpete 3y ago
The data quality of wearables to detect sleep stages is in the 90%+ accuracy range now. Which is near what polysomnographers score at - nobody completely agrees on what stage is what, there is always deviation. Wearables are definitely good enough at this stage. Zeo is not the only consumer EEG either, though all the current headbands (including what we are building at https://affectablesleep.com https://affectablesleep.com) have some sort of sleep stimulation at it's core. Frenzband I believe is shipping, I haven't tried one, and don't know anyone who has. We have a Somnee at the office, and it is unbearably painful to wear. I'm highly skeptical of the "science" of either of these devices as well.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tjoff 3y ago
  90+ accuracy seems very optimistic. Still, I'd bet that whatever accuracy wearables get only work on a population, not individuals. I'm not surprised they are decent (though they can barely detect when you are sleeping...) but I don't put any faith at all on an individual basis. Given the data they can collect that is the best anyone can hope for anyway. So if you want to diagnose your own sleep, which you presumably would want to do if you are suspecting an issue, I wouldn't trust them one bit.
- burning_hamster 3y ago
  > The data quality of wearables to detect sleep stages is in the 90%+ accuracy range now. Citation needed.

cassianoleal 3y ago

There was the Dreem 2 as well but they have also ended production.

magicalhippo 3y ago

Heh my SO just showed me her Garmin-something tracker log the other day, and it showed her having an hour of deep sleep when she'd been lying on the couch watching TV. It's also showing various sleep stages whens he knows she's been awake, trying to sleep.

chimeracoder 3y ago
> It's also showing various sleep stages whens he knows she's been awake, trying to sleep. To be fair, people actually aren't that great at detecting when they (or others) are really sleeping. Especially for one's self, it's common to believe that you spent more of the night tossing and turning than you really did, when in reality you actually got some light sleep sprinkled in those periods. That said, consumer-grade wearable devices are demonstrably not great at this either.
drewg123 3y ago
I love Garmin watches for many reasons, but their sleep tracking is horrible. Even my ancient MS Band did a better job than my Garmin Fenix 6
- jurassicfoxy 3y ago
  It's pretty awful. Though they seem to be capable of detecting terrible sleep, at least. Gotta love a 40 sleep score night.
  - drewg123 3y ago
    Agreed. But it can't tell if I'm jet-lagged and I wake up 3 hours into my sleep at 2:30 am and lay there still, yet unable to get back to sleep. That is sometimes an 80 sleep score night, when really it should be a 40.
- oraphalous 3y ago
  I got a epix 2 pro which has their new heart rate tech. It tracks my sleep very reliably.
nottorp 3y ago
> it showed her having an hour of deep sleep when she'd been lying on the couch watching TV The Garmin may be right considering the quality of TV... even if she had her eyes open...
ornornor 3y ago
Same here. Sleep tracking is mediocre at best. Some nights I’ve spent hours wide awake but lying down, the watch thinks I was awake for 20 min. Or when I wake up in the morning and read a book or scroll the phone to not wake anyone else up, the watch will usually log it as REM. But it never showed any naps as actual sleeping time. Until I saw your comment I thought that the garmin would only log sleep overnight and never during the day. Did you have to enable something for it to log naps?

KennyBlanken 3y ago

That study is nearly ten years old and almost certainly not relevant anymore. The Basis Peak did a good job at tracking sleep but they got bought up and killed off by Intel for god knows what reason. The Peak also did automatic activity detection and it was quite good at it. Basis also had hands-down the best visualization of activity and sleep trends, and was the only watch at the time to do full time HRM. They claimed the Peak watches were a fire risk and recalled them, probably to have a reason to get rid of all the back end infrastructure. Garmin still can't reliably autodetect biking and its sleep tracking is pretty terrible, too.

PrairieFire 3y ago

I miss the Zeo. The app would still work locally long after they shut the backend down, until there just was no more aftermarket / eBay supply of their unique silver coated contact padded headbands that actually did the brainwave monitoring. I do find the Apple Watch Ultra seems to be close to at least being in the ballpark in terms of stage and duration accuracy as its output is comparable to what I last got with Zeo, albeit 10 years ago.

verticalscaler 3y ago

This review channel begs to differ: https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist/videos https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist/videos He very throughly compares countless models with a Polar H10 strap. Some come close enough.

CharlesW 3y ago

> Wrist watches can't really detect sleep stages. As someone else noted, the paper you linked to is from 2015. Apple Watch couldn't do it until watchOS 9 (2022, 7 years later), but can now do this pretty reliably. You might find the "Algorithm Development and Validation" section of this whitepaper interesting: https://www.apple.com/healthcare/docs/site/Estimating_Sleep_Stages_from_Apple_Watch_Sept_2023.pdf https://www.apple.com/healthcare/docs/site/Estimating_Sleep_...

pkoird 3y ago
Thanks for linking this. I always did wonder how they did it. From a cursory read, it looks like the basic approach is to collect accelerometer data and train it to predict ground truth labels generated via a consumer EEG device. Not sure if each epochs (30s) were considered iids. I'd assume that the overall sequence of activity would be much more informative than a single 30s activity considered independently.
- cj 3y ago
  Sometimes at work I’m concentrating so hard my Apple Watch logs a sleep session… Definitely not 100% accurate but as someone who checks their sleep log (and time in each stage using the Pillow app) daily, it seems pretty accurate and I can correlate how I feel on a given day back to that day’s sleep report with pretty good correlation. Definitely not perfect but better than nothing. If you’ve ever been on medication that suppresses REM sleep, Apple Watch detects REM rebound very clearly.
  - pkoird 3y ago
    I won't be surprised. The accelerometers seem to be pretty sensitive. Enough to measure any variations in heart rates and breathing patterns which are likely highly correlated with sleep patterns.
  - astrange 3y ago
    I didn't think it tracked sleep unless you put it into Sleep mode explicitly.

pedalpete 3y ago

The data quality of wearables to detect sleep stages is in the 90%+ accuracy range now. Which is near what polysomnographers score at - nobody completely agrees on what stage is what, there is always deviation. Wearables are definitely good enough at this stage. Zeo is not the only consumer EEG either, though all the current headbands (including what we are building at https://affectablesleep.com https://affectablesleep.com) have some sort of sleep stimulation at it's core. Frenzband I believe is shipping, I haven't tried one, and don't know anyone who has. We have a Somnee at the office, and it is unbearably painful to wear. I'm highly skeptical of the "science" of either of these devices as well.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tjoff 3y ago
90+ accuracy seems very optimistic. Still, I'd bet that whatever accuracy wearables get only work on a population, not individuals. I'm not surprised they are decent (though they can barely detect when you are sleeping...) but I don't put any faith at all on an individual basis. Given the data they can collect that is the best anyone can hope for anyway. So if you want to diagnose your own sleep, which you presumably would want to do if you are suspecting an issue, I wouldn't trust them one bit.
burning_hamster 3y ago
> The data quality of wearables to detect sleep stages is in the 90%+ accuracy range now. Citation needed.