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According to the National Institutes of Health, 50 to 70 million Americans are affected by chronic sleep disorders, and I am very fortunate that I am not one of them. I didn’t realize this until just a few years back. I have no problems sleeping. Sure, occasionally I’ll have a night where I randomly wake up in the middle of the night, or have trouble falling asleep, but it typically doesn’t last more than one night & the visualization techniques I use will usually work to get me to sleep.
The bodybugg armband has the ability to show sleep efficiency, but the web application doesn’t expose it. Sure, you can wear it to bed & you can see in the activity graph if you got up, but overall it doesn’t display anything different if you’re just lying there, awake & still.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that the fitbit does much better.
Okay – so I wore the fitbit to bed. When synchronized, I entered when I went to bed & when I woke up. The graph that you see here was a bad night’s sleep (for me).
It highlights when I was turning over in my sleep & when I got up to go to the bathroom & when my dog woke me up to be let out at 5:15 am. But the thing is, I already knew that. I was there – awake.
So, it brings up the question: How useful is this feature? Do people NOT know that they’re not sleeping? How is having this information going to help me sleep better?
I don’t know. Sure, it’s cool. But, how is it useful? The site doesn’t provide any resources on how to improve sleep. There are a million different resources out there for improving sleep & they range from changing behaviors to cleaning up our environment.
Cleaning up your nutrition, daily exercise, and weight los are certainly going to help with the quality of your sleep. Are the site developers assuming that a user will compare how they are sleeping from when they initially started using the fitbit to when they became more active, or lost weight & their sleep efficiency will improve?
Round 3 Winner
Out of default this round winner is the fitbit – because the bodybugg doesn’t have this feature. But, I don’t necessarily think that they need it.
Next Round bodybugg vs fitbit: Round 4 – Activity & Accuracy >>