As someone with a sleep disorder, I can appreciate the value of a sleep score to help me quickly gauge the quality of my sleep regardless of the length (6 hrs but a higher percentage of deep sleep would be better than 9 hrs with negligible deep sleep for instance). However, the sleep score is completely meaningless since, despite the articles from Fitbit with the claim of how its calculated, I will get scores near or above 80 when I spend more time awake than in REM or deep sleep, don't meet my overall sleep goal and don't meet either goal re time to bed or time to wake up. If I've meet none of my sleep goals and I'm awake more than I'm getting restorative sleep, how is that considered a good night's sleep by Fitbit?! And the score from night to the next does not seem to change by any discernible pattern with respect to the other variables that are important to restorative sleep.
As a physician, we actually are allowed to and do pay some attention to values from trackers. However, without understanding how the sleep scores are calculated and seeing a real discernible pattern or relationship between it and the other important data points, it is useless. Sleep stage data, steps, active minutes, HR data, etc is of some value to those of us in the medical community.
Fitbit, please provide more information on the sleep score algorithm! And please provide some information on the benchmarks for what qualifies as good, fair, etc. Finally, please do not make us pay for what was previously free and / or force us to use the dashboard instead of the app (honestly, why does the dashboard even exist?).
