Percentage of time spent in sleep stages

[TarrantP]

I feel if the percentages were adjusted to exclude time awake, they would be more accurate and informative.

To explain, I really like the fact the amount of 'awake' time is displayed, giving the user a better reflection of the time spent sleeping, not just the time spent in bed.

However, when it comes to calculating the percentage of your time spent in either REM, light sleep or deep sleep, I do not see why 'awake time' is part of this. For example, if I am in bed for 9 hours and I get 7 hours sleep (meaning I was awake for 2 hours), then I want to know the share of SLEEP time accounted for by each stage. In the current format, 1 hour of REM sleep in the example above would equate to 11.1% (1 hour as a percentage of 9 hours). But, what I really want to know is, how much time in REM is as a share of the hours I was actually sleeping. That would be 14% in this example (1 hour as a percentage of 7 hours). Including the two hours 'awake' is unnecessary for the distribution percentage, in my opinion. The longer the awake time is, the more misleading the proportion in each stage becomes.

To summarize, I want to know the proportion of time spent in each sleep stage, but only in relation to the hours I was actually asleep.

[WavyDavey]

Hi @TarrantP,

Well awake time happens throughout the night, and so is considered part of the sleep period. The percentages of REM and Deep Sleep benchmarks are all set assuming there is awake time as part of the period.

You can certainly calculate your own percentages on sleep time minus awake time, but if you do any research on the web for sleep cycles, you may find your numbers are off compared to what's commonly reported. So I wouldn't expect Fitbit to make a change in this regard without everyone else changing their numbers also.