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Last week I took off my Fitbit after three years of loyal use. The arbitary, useless sleep score, the unclear, boring new dashboard and Fitbit’s failure to listen and respond to their customers have lost me as a customer.
WebmistressMing makes an excellent point in conclusion to her well-documented comments. Comments that there are options is so true and I am just starting path she has gone.
And the classic dashboard is something that Fitbit should reinstate immediately to help those of us who preferred it’s straightforward simple easy to read style.
Just from my observation here, if you think that you can use your Fitbit only on Fitbit...guess again! I have used my Fitbit on GoogleFit and especially Runtastic are there and they offer a safer community than what I've seen here. You can use Stridekick with Garmin, Fitbit, or Apple Watch. But you just need to connect to your Fitbit app. More of us are doing a hybrid of using our Fitbit updates to promote Stridekick., All we need Fitbit for is updates, nothing more. For a more complete Fitbit supported app, Runtastic is the way to go...and I highly recommend that. You also have the option of organizing your own community where you have friends that you can trust. If the Runtastic app worked with Stridekick, I would be more than happy to work with Stridekick and Runtastic together. I still need to research GoogleFit because Fitbit is being considered to be purchased by Google and then Apple. There's another player in this situation but if you're interested you'll want to look up the top three companies interested in Fitbit trackers. I would say Google is the best hunch. Sales if Fitbit trackers plummeted to the point of being a dire situation so hopefully we will think of this purchase as a good thing to improve the credibility of this app.https://www.phonearena.com/news/Fitbit-considers-selling-the-company_id119144
As someone with a sleep disorder and migraines, 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 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?).
I think the sleep score is just a way to up sell services. It doesn't work properly, gives shoddy information and stresses people out with no option to turn it off. The customer services is terrible..."it is under consideration" and "if enough people ask for it maybe we will have our developers change it". Like people don't have a choice in what they purchase! I'm done with Fitbit, it's getting on in age so it going in the trash and I will take use another brand. Gladly
While researching possible tracker options, I discovered that fitness tracker rings (Oura & Motiv) are a thing and they are apparently quite good at sleep tracking. While they both don't seem to have the depth of tacking the number of activities that Fitbit tracks, the sleep information they both provide are stunning, especially when you consider the tracker is just a normal size ring.
Obviously we have people materially invested in fitness rings on here. A quick check on Amazon reviews will tell you they aren't ready for prime time. I don't think anyone wants substandard technology to replace nonexistent customer service. Besides, they don't respond to customers either.
Thanks SO much for this info. I just watched a video on EMF's and you can wear this in airplane mode very safely! It is ceramic and not aluminum like the Apple Watch so I am definitely sold on this device! I love that it tracks activity and isn't obsessed with just steps! Thanks again for sharing!
I cannot possibly agree more. The sleep score function is not only useless, it is insulting. I can judge the quality of my sleep myself based on my own personal needs and requirements, individual-specific factors, and environmental influences I am so unclear on why Fitbit felt that they should be the ultimate judge of what "good quality" sleep is and then make sure that they let me know that I fail based on arbitrary qualities they decided should be universally valued or derided. At the very least Fitbit should make this feature optional and something I can turn off, but
This is not what I paid for when I purchased a Fitbit. What's more, this is the second time in a short time frame that I've had to get on their forum and provide basic, self-evident feedback.The first was when Fitbit grossly violated my privacy by creating a popup every time I opened the app informing me that if I did not constantly provide location access (regardless of whether the app was open or not) that my device would not function properly. The fact that this company feels like they should have access to our locations at all times AND have the ability to judge whether or not I am doing a "good job" sleeping or not based on arbitrary, nonsensical, and over-generalized qualities makes me incredibly angry. The more they do things like this, the closer I get to trashing my Fitbit and purchasing something else (and for the record, Fitbit, this is the third version I've purchased from you. Based on the way things are going, it will most likely be the last).
One wonders if someone has infiltrated their company to drive down stock values to make it cheaper for a Google or Apple purchase. There is no legitimate reason for a company with superior technology to take these actions and inactions.
I highly doubt Fitbit will do anything about making their baseless sleep score an option as they are promoting this feature on the new watches - I'll be switching over to Apple at some point in the near future.
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I've used Fitbit for about 3 years to track sleep. I started when my daughter gave me her old one when I stayed at her house and she didn't believe I only got about 4 hours of sleep average (and still functioned). She and I were both appalled to find that I was correct after wearing the Fitbit for a couple weeks. I wore her old one for a year and got my sleep up to 6 hours a night using different sleep hygiene methods and then it died. I liked my progress so bought a Fitbit Charge 2 and have been using it and keeping track of my hours and making note of wakefulness, deep sleep, etc. I found that using the Benchmark I was wakeful far less than the average woman my age. Evidently when I sleep, I am as dead. Perhaps that is why I tend to sleep less than the average person. I eventually worked my way up to 6 1/2-7 hours of sleep a night average 6 hours and 40 minutes average over 3 years time last I checked. The problem now is I can't check that anymore. My hours slept still appear for each night if I scroll down. I can access a 30 Day Average only, however. I no longer have access to my own longitudinal data about my own hours of sleep. As a person with a PhD, this is beyond annoying. My "n of one" study data is being withheld from me. I have no choice but to abort the study. As such, I no longer wear my Fitbit as of two nights ago, and have resumed wearing the beautiful watch my husband gave me which tells me the time and the date and never needs winding or a battery or even the sun. It has diamonds and is basically a fine timepiece and a piece of fine jewelry. This morning I woke up and felt great. I knew I had slept well and I didn't need any device to tell me so. I didn't even care about how many hours I slept. The Fitbit served a purpose. I learned to set conditions under which I sleep very well. If I have difficulty in the future and can't solve the issue myself, I will go to a doctor and get a professional opinion. In the meantime, enjoy my sleep data, Fitbit, as you won't be getting any more.
Still hating the sleep score. I am wearing my Inspire only to track distance when running because I am training for a race. But I will not wear it at night and have removed the sleep widget from the app. I am livid that I can no longer use this device to track sleep as advertised when I bought it. As soon as I can afford a Garmin or an Apple Watch, that is what I'm going to do. This begging and pleading to simply give the option of not seeing this meaningless sleep score, and restoring the meaningful sleep data we use to see, has gone on too long.
I tried researching other apps that work with Fibit and track sleep, and found that good ones are paid. So, all possible solutions to the sleep score problem are equally bad for me now. Either I throw away/sell my Fitbit and purchase a different device, losing money because of that, or I lose more money on additional third-party apps.
So, I came up with an idea - let's ask Fitbit to allow us to pay them to remove sleep score out of our sight. It can be called Premium Lite and cost a couple of dollars. I would buy it personally as a temporary solution until my Fitbit dies (should be soon) and I replace it with a better alternative.
Of course, this sounds shady at first sight, because it basically means intentionally creating a problem for someone and then asking to pay you money to fix that problem. But you know what's even more shady? Creating a problem and not giving the victim any possibility to remove that problem.
Sleep scores are useless for me. I need to know hours slept per sleep and per day. I share this info with my doctor but now I have to manually track my totals. Go back to the way it was.
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