I've had a frustrating experience with Fitbit's tech support regarding Premium sleep reports. I had e-mail correspondence with 9 different members of Fitbit's tech support team beginning on March 14.
One suggested that to get a more accurate picture of my sleep that I medicate myself.
Here's a copy of that e-mail.
I have sleep apnea and a form of general insomnia for which the cause has yet to be determined. I don't have any trouble falling asleep but I do have trouble staying asleep and waking up too early. Those are two of the the three qualifications of insomnia per both The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the DSM-V.
I've been impressed with how accurate the tracker has been recording my fractured sleep. More often than not I wake up 2-4 times per night - not counting the times I'm restles/awake per the tracker - and can be awake anywhere between fifteen minutes and an hour and a half before going back to sleep. Fitbit's tracker gets all of this. Here's a good example.
The problem is that while the tracker gets it right, and the information displayed on the Dashboard is also right, that the Premium Sleep reports - for which we pay - only grab the longest sleep log. So on March 6, where I met my goal of 7 hours of sleep (admittedly not an idea 7 hrs of sleep), the app and the Dashboard both reflect the total time asleep, which was 7hr and 59m.
The Report Section records 5 hours. Here's a shot of that week's report.
The Sleep Reports are trying to help us sleep better. But how can they do that without using all of the information logged on the tracker? There's actual analysis on that page, and for the above referenced week, the analysis was this that I got more sleep than only 3 percent of men my age, that I was averaging 4 hrs of sleep every night, that I'd improved over last week - but all of that was wrong, because their entire analysis - all the data on that page! - is working off incomplete data.
The first Tier Two tech to handle this case, and the 8th with whom I communicated, wrote, "Premium only captures the first sleep record of the day. In order for you to see the sleep record, in Premium, the way you desire, the record must be edited. Using the sleep record from 3/7 as an example for this troubleshooting routine, delete the logs for 3/7 5:16 am - 7:26 am and 9:31 am - 10:00 am. Once that is done edit the record for 12:47 am - 4:31 am to have an end time of 10:00 am, the time you actually woke up. Once edited in this manner your sleep log should more accurately record the sleep activity for the night of 3/7. You may edit your future sleep logs in this way if this produces a satisfactory report."
Three problems with this.
- It doesn't capture the first sleep record. It captures the longest sleep record.
- The purpose of a tracker is for automated tracking. Manually editing sleep records, especially if you're someone who wakes up often during the night, ends up being a lot of work- work that Fitbit doesn't want us to do.
- The suggestion itself doesn't work. I replied to that e-mail including a screen shot of the dashboard pre- and post-edits. I'll post those here.
If you look at the premium report above, it reports 3hr and 29m of sleep for March 7, because it pulled the longest sleep record on March 7 prior to the suggested edits. Right now, it shows 8hr and 8min.
When the last email arrived acknowledging all of my assertions regarding data reporting were accurate, that person said he would forward the information to their team - whichever team that might be - and couldn't promise any changes.
I wrote back asking for someone other than tech support to contact me as I felt the frustrations I had with with tech support needed to be heard.
And someone other than tech support needs to know they have at least one staff member who offered medical advice that would be illegal for even a Registered Nurse to offer.
What if I'd taken that advice? What if instead of the normal sleep meds that I take, I doubled them? And before getting into bed, not used to the increased dosages and increased sedation that came with it, I stumbled, fell, and cracked my head on something?
This was a really horrible experience with their tech support team. Bad enough for me to reconsider having bought into their whole ecosystem and start to look somewhere else.
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