Smart Alarm? Any 3rd party app that does it?

[flowerdealer]

I would really love a 'smart' alarm that tries and wakes you up in a moment of light sleep. Some people report great success with such alarms. Any plans to implement something like that for the Fitbit? Is there any 3rd party app that does it? Thanks!

[Zemme]

There's phone 3rd party apps that will do it, butbnothing that integrates with fitbit in real time. I've searched for half a year now, and fitbit will NOT integrate this feature so everyone stop hoping and just go get another jawbone, the Garmin vivosmart, or wait for the MI band 3. There's threads for thistthat are even older than this and with thousands of up votes, but no support

[lbevins]

That literally all I wanted a tracker for! I need to wake up at 2:45 without waking my husband up... I bought a jawbone, it broke quickly... Tried misfit it didn't work well... Now I have the charge but it doesn't wake me up... The alarm shuts off too quickly I've tried putting all 8 alarms close together hoping it'll wake me up.. but nope... EVEN just being able to set the style of impulse... Or the duration of impulse for alarms would be better. PLEASE FITBIT FIX YOUR DATED ALARM SYSTEM! 

[john-is-my-name]

The fix for this would be so simple - the pulse alarm should go off until the user presses the button twice to cancel it. I would love a feature where if I don't turn off the alarm after ten pluses, the pulse is augmented with an audible alarm from my fitbit watch and my smartphone.

The workaround for this is to set a second alarm on your smartphone as a backup.  It irks me that I have to do this as fitbit should be able to function as a abck-up alarm by itself.

[MadeleineR]

Dear Fitbit,

The Smart Alarm: why you should care about getting that feature pronto:

1) Health. If your company product concept is centered in optimizing health, then how can you continue to ignore what sleep specialists typically recommend: wake up at the right point in the user's sleep cycle.

2) Sales. So many of your former customers are switching to other bands because your product lacks this key feature. Why do you continue to ignore the market demand for this quality of life feature?

3) Brand loyalty. Consumers are known to stay loyal to a product/company, even if that company is not meeting consumer needs in some key ways, IF that company COMMUNICATES that they are indeed listening to customer and expresses a genuine effort to work toward what the customer needs. Are you ignoring your loyal consumer's needs?

I've been reading through page after page of discussion threads with loyal brand users so frustrated over the lack of a smart alarm feature. 

My husband is a physical therapist and I'm a Pilates instructor. After years of using jawbone products, we switched to you're charge 2 bands, and now, we can't help but regret that investment.

 For couples, the smart alarm allows one person to wake up without an alarm disturbing the other person, WHEN it's best for them to wake up. Other ways, like 3rd party aps, rely on an audible alarm to wake user up, thus, not good for couples.

If I've somehow missed that this feature is now available, I apologize, truly. 

Would someone appropriate within the Fitbit company please update the community of users/customers who need this?

[sarahprib56]

Well said

[SunsetRunner]

How is this still not a thing. Also how is there still NO REPLY FROM FITBIT

[sophiieaalii]

Wow how annoying 3 years later and still no reply from Fitbit....

[Janerb]

Really, Fitbit. Since you already document my request of seven and a half hours of actual sleep and you track same, why not an alarm that wakes me then, or soon after when I return to light sleep? Does this sound too complicated for a programmer?

[fit-meister]

This is so true..... 

I'm already regretting purchasing the fitbit charge 3 

2 letsdown are; 

Step overcounting 

And no smart alarm!!!  

Fitbit you are going to lose customers in 2019 if this isn't rolled out soon 

[vanderlife]

i have heard that light dream is about after 1.5 h of sleep... so if you wake ap after 3/4,30/6/7,30 h from falling asleep you should be rested

[DocDillinger]

That's not true. It's even too simple in theory, but in reality everybody
has another rythm and that timing depends on a lot of things. It's
impossible to just calculate when it will be a good time to get an alarm.

[vanderlife]

But you can calculate it by trial and error method

[DocDillinger]

No, because it is not constant. Your sleep phases tonight will not be the
same tomorrow. It fluctuates, depends on when you have eaten, drank
something, what you are dreaming, how your day was, etc. It's just not
possible to foresee.

[Calathea77]

From what I've read, activity trackers do not have the tech to detect REM sleep, and are notoriously bad at guessing sleep stages. They don't have electrodes on your scalp, they're never going to be like a sleep study.

For people who've used this feature but ith other devices, how well did it work for you? I'm wondering if this thread selects for the people who got on with it, and if there are plenty more people who tried it and found it awful that we're not hearing from.

I can recommend dawn simulation for waking up more easily, by the way. The gradually increasing light brings you out of sleep in a way that feels gentle, and presumably causes you to go into light sleep before awakening. Use a smartbulb or two (Lifx or Hue) in the bedroom, and then you can also programme it to fade down to warmer colours in the evening to help you sleep. 

[john-is-my-name]

Years ago, I bought a  ZEO sleep tracker. They are now-off the market. I don not recommend you buy a used one!  While this device had electrodes and, if I recall, they claimed 5/6 accuracy of professional grade machines. To calculate  Zeo relied heavily on an algorithm that made the assumption that its users sleep at least 8.5 hours a night.   I average 5.5 hours a night.    I concluded that the data was to skewed to be reliable

FitBit does not have head electrodes so it is inevitably less accurate than the ZEO, that was not very accurate. FitBit inevitability uses an to estimate REM, deep sleep, light sleep.   Thus, if FitBit had a "wake me up at the optimal time" function, it would not work that well

I bought the https://www.sleepcycle.com/ ap, which uses a smartphone's accelerator nor pulse rate. It did not work that well. The premise is that you specify a time window of the earliest and latest time you want to be woken up and the ap wakes you up at the optimal time within this window.  It ALWAYS woke me up at the earliest time in this window!  

.

[vascobm]

@DocDillinger, which is why using fitbit for the job would make sense: it can start monitoring your sleep about 30 minutes prior to your desired waking time and use the accelerometer to detect when you are on a light sleep phase within that window and wake you up then. I've been using this functionality on my pebble for years and this is the only thing preventing me going back to fitbit. 🙂

[Artemix]

Exactly that. I totally agree with the last poster. I'm amazed that this is not integrated in the new Fitbit Versa device.. I just joined the Fitbit community with my Fitbit Versa by the way.., just because I thought this feature was available.. 😞

[WavyDavey]

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@Calathea77 wrote:

From what I've read, activity trackers do not have the tech to detect REM sleep, and are notoriously bad at guessing sleep stages. They don't have electrodes on your scalp, they're never going to be like a sleep study.

For people who've used this feature but ith other devices, how well did it work for you? I'm wondering if this thread selects for the people who got on with it, and if there are plenty more people who tried it and found it awful that we're not hearing from.

I can recommend dawn simulation for waking up more easily, by the way. The gradually increasing light brings you out of sleep in a way that feels gentle, and presumably causes you to go into light sleep before awakening. Use a smartbulb or two (Lifx or Hue) in the bedroom, and then you can also programme it to fade down to warmer colours in the evening to help you sleep. 

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You're pretty much correct. The sleep stages identification for REM and deep sleep is still new technology. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not quite there to base an alarm on. Also, we're assuming it's calculating sleep stages in real-time on the watch itself, which is something I don't know is true.

I know Garmin doesn't do this either. I don't think AW or GearOS does either. Does anyone know of a tracker that does this? Because if there isn't, we really shouldn't blame Fitbit.

Years ago, I had a smartphone app (I think it was called Smart Alarm?), that reportedly had this feature. It used motion detection, and as I recall, didin't work very well.