Fitbit has been helping people track their sleep information for over ten years. Now, the company’s latest Fitbit Premium feature, Sleep Profile, will provide personalized data to improve sleep quality across the board. Previously, Fitbits were able to track nightly patterns such as sleep duration, restfulness, and REM sleep. While that information can be helpful for understanding a person’s sleeping habits, Sleep Profile will up the ante by tracking even more data points and, perhaps more importantly, will help users understand how to interpret the data.
In addition to sleep duration, restfulness, and REM sleep, your Fitbit can now track sleep schedule variability, your time before sound sleep, and disrupted sleep. Users will have access to the individual data points after each night but won’t receive any interpretation of the information until the end of each month. Sleep Profile will then analyze the data, compare it to other users, and give a full report on your sleep patterns.
With the information in hand, Sleep Profile will be able to provide a more comprehensive look at all facets of a person’s sleeping habits. From there, the app also provides “additional guidance” on how to help improve those habits to decrease sleep-related health risks like cardiovascular problems and poor cognitive functioning. The guidance consists of simple suggestions such as creating a more consistent bedtime routine or listening to some of Fitbit’s in-app mindfulness content to work on unwinding from the day before getting ready to sleep.
The profiles that Sleep Profile creates are based on different animals for easier data interpretation. As a person’s habits change (hopefully for the better when following the app’s instructions), the animals will change month to month. Fitbit makes a point to say that there isn’t an “ideal” animal to be represented by in-app, but that each one simply helps users understand what their sleep is like and how it can be improved.
Sleep Profiles launches on July 4 for Premium Fitbit subscribers and is compatible with Fitbit Sense, Versa 3, Versa 2, Charge 5, Luxe, and Inspire 2 devices. Similar to Fitbit’s AFib detection software, Sleep Profiles is not a stand-in for real medical consultation.
The OnePlus Buds Clip are a new pair of open-ear earbuds built around a simple convenience. They join Sony’s LinkBuds Clip in the growing ear-cuff category, but either OnePlus bud can go on either ear.
Sensors recognize how the earbuds are being worn and route the audio channels accordingly. There’s no label to check before putting them on, and the feature also works when only one bud is used.
We buy fitness bands and activity trackers to keep tabs on our exercise, but it is easy to forget to start tracking or switch modes when moving between different activities. For Fitbit and Pixel Watch users, that could soon become a lot less annoying, as Google is rolling out a major upgrade to automatic activity tracking that can recognize more than 100 types of exercise, up from just 10 before.
Google first showed off the improved tracking earlier this month alongside the Fitbit Edge. It is now coming to Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5, and Google claims the added context behind the system makes workout detection nearly twice as accurate while cutting missed activities by more than half. Fitbit Edge will support it too.