If you use your Fitbit tracker to monitor your sleep, you could be about to get a smart upgrade that will give you even more insight into your slumber.
According to a report from the folks at 9to5Google, Fitbit is adding a new sleep feature for some users that will create a “personalised sleep schedule”.
Right now, wearing any Fitbit device to bed will track your sleep by detecting the length of time you spend in light, deep and REM sleep stages, as well as any time you spent awake. You can view this data in the Fitbit app for iPhone or Android in graph form, with some other metrics such as your average heart rate when you’ve hit the hay.
But Fitbit opens up more metrics to customers who choose to pay for Fitbit Premium, the £7.99 subscription service that unlocks more insights. This includes assigning you with a ‘sleep animal’ that reflects your sleep patterns. As a wearer of the Fitbit Charge 6, I’m a giraffe, apparently, indicating I don’t sleep for as long as I should.
By delving into a preview version of the Fitbit app for Android, 9to5Google has spotted a new sleep feature for Fitbit Labs, an experimental section of the Fitbit app that only appears for some Fitbit Premium subscribers. These tools are a way for Fitbit, now owned by Google, to push new updates and ideas to a select group of Fitbit users before potentially releasing the feature to everyone.
This new personalised sleep schedule is reportedly called “sleep need”, and will help you find your “ideal bedtime and wake times”.
This works by the app prompting you to share some details throughout the day on your health and activity and how you feel at certain times. Fitbit takes these answers and cross references it with your sleep data to then recommend how much sleep you need. It’ll then calculate a personalised bedtime and wake time recommendation you can choose to follow, the report says.
Surveys come in the morning, midday and evening and ask about things such as your energy levels.
At present, the Fitbit app lets you set your own bedtime and wake time targets but doesn’t have a system to intelligently recommend when they should be based on your sleep data. This new sleep need feature could prove a good way for paying Premium subscribers to eke even more value from their Fitbit trackers.
Though this tool isn’t available widely yet, it’s likely it’d work whichever Fitbit you have, as long as you pay for Fitbit Premium and have access to Fitbit Labs.
Fitbit recently pushed out a software update for its Charge 6, Inspire 3, Sense 2 and Versa 4 trackers that added optional status indicators on the home screen, as well as Bluetooth updates for the Charge 6 and Inspire 3.
The firm has had its fair share of trouble since being acquired in 2021, with the admission it won’t make another smartwatch, likely because Google is using Fitbit tech and software in the Pixel Watch series.
Express.co.uk recently reported on a bug affecting multiple Fitbits that stopped them calculating distance metrics that had not been fixed despite being reported by users months previously. Fitbit did not respond to repeated requests for comment.