Total Daily Sleep Time Inaccurate

[mechanesthesia]

If you have ever slept more than once in a day in your life, forget about using Fitbit to accurately track your sleep.  No, you are not confused and there is nothing wrong with your eyes.  Apparently the developers at Fitbit are unable to program any sort of function to add your total sleep for the entire day.  In the meantime they are stealing money from us users who purchased these products and even wasted $50 for the "premium" service so we could track our sleep and get accurate sleep reports.

Nope.  Fitbit only tracks the LONGEST sleep record.  

Took a 2 hour nap? Doesn't count!

Woke up in the middle of the night, and went back to sleep?  Doesn't count!

Studies have already suggested that a monophasic 8-hour sleep schedule is a myth.  This sleep pattern has only recently been adopted with the industrial age, but yet a 1/3rd of Americans are unable to adopt this type of pattern.  Historically, a biphasic sleep schedule was more common.  They would call it "1st sleep" and "2nd sleep," where people would normally be awake for a few hours in between... Now doesn't it make sense why sometimes you wake up mid-sleep only to fall asleep a little while later?

Check out these links for more info:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/05/8-hour-sleep-myth_n_1322376.html

Also, let's not leave out the polyphasic sleep enthusiasts...

It's frustrating just how little Fitbit understands their target market.  For those of us who like to track everything, we are on top of stuff like the aforementioned links...  Why isn't the company who is SELLING this on top of these things?

I am very upset that the people at Fitbit would go this long without noticing such a simple thing and have the audacity to sell this product like this while misleading their customers.  

EXAMPLE:

Today I took two "power naps" as seen on my log.  One for 17 mins and one for 20 mins:

In the dashboard, it only shows the longest sleep record, which is 20 mins.  This is not accurate:

The sleep report you pay $50 to see also has this erroneous information, it only shows one sleep record per day.  

It gets better.  Guess what, this is how the $50 report portrays the information to you, as a graph showing how you rank with everyone else.  If you actually add it up and average it out, it DOES NOT take into account this "missing sleep time."  It only takes into account the longest sleep record.  So if one day you slept 5 hours, then you slept another 4 hours, those 4 hours don't count and are not added to your average or to the daily totals, and if you do this more than once in a week, you can already see how your total sleep will be under-reported.

This is EXTREMELY misleading.  In my case, I actually showed these graphs to my doctor and was prescribed medicine based on it.  Can you imagine the consequences?

Moderator Edit: Subject edited for issue clarification and word choice

[Sabrinamoore84]

How do I get the notifications for this conversation turned off? It's turned into a "i know more than you" conversation when all I'm trying to do is help people that asked me a question.

[rc3]

Look to the upper right of your recent comment, and there will be a "Topic Options" menu. In the drop down list, click on the "unsubscribe" text, and that should do it. At least, that's the way it should work. Good luck.

[mack05]

the person who wrote about the inaccurate sleep info is right on, this device is a bunch of **ahem**, I mean its worthless.  

Everyday: 1. I can't find sleep on the appp  2. I can't force a sync  3. the wrist band, the app, and the desktop all have different numbers.  4. bought the thing for sleep and it is just not accurate. 5. dont buy because you wll be very frustrated and spend hours trying to sort throught all the problems.   😞

signed; really pissed off

[mack05]

Sir, you are so right.  I too had the Nike and it went out and I bought this piece of crap.  I agree with everything you said, plus.   This is a reall piece of SH----

[rc3]

Sounds like you need to schedule the time to reset your Fitbit, your hand
held device, and your computer, as if you had never done it before. Do your
computer first, ensure it has the right Fitbit, and you have all of the
updates. Make sure Fitbit is fully charged before you begin.



On your phone (assumption), delete the Fitbit app that you have. Fully
uninstall it, not just remove it from your present screen.



Download the app again. Then follow directions. You must have your Bluetooth
set to "on" on your phone, otherwise nothing will sync.



Take your time. All of this requires a little more knowledge and patience
than usual, though when done correctly, it will work.



Then you can begin to dissect what's wrong with the sleep portion of the
app.



Good Luck.

[LeeKpt]

I tried to enter a single sleep time to span the total time for a case when the software split the sleep into two segments.  It was not allowed.  The message stated that a sleep log already existed for the time period.

I was able to get it to work, though.  On the mobil app, I selected the second asleep time period by pressing on it.  This brought up an 'edit sleep' form.  I changed its time range to a one minute range past the end of the original sleep range.  Next, I changed the sleep time range for the first asleep time period to include the full time range desired.  The times for the two asleep time periods can not overlap.  Now, the first asleep time period has the full time range giving the correct sleep calculation and the second asleep time period adds nothing to the sleep time.

[jyoung2]

It is disappointing that with if fitbit has the major market share that there is still some major problems with its data collection and display.

I have the Surge and get multiple options for measuring my sleep.  The dashboard gives me a pretty close approximation of the actual amount of time I sleep.  The premium service only counts the longest period of sleep.  If I try to log in the total time actually slept.  I get an error message that I have already recorded a sleep pattern.  Actually, for last night I had seven sleep patterns, but the premium service only counts one.

There is a similar problem with steps and HR using the treadmill.  The Surge does not do a good job measuring steps on the treadmill.  (I need to hold on to the treadmill arms to maintain my balance.)  So, I put the Surge in my pocket -- which defeats the pulse monitoring feature.  So, I use a heart monitor and digift to monitor my heart rate.  While fitbit and digifit allegedly interface, only part of the data is exchanged.  Fitbit will record the amount of time for a digifit session, but will not (always) inport the HR data and will not export the steps and distance data to digifit.

Also, while fitbit seems to do a good job of tracking HR, it only reports back resting HR data that has been manually logged.  So, I still manually take my BP for resting HR each morning, which is always different from the resting HR on the dashboard.

So, while it seems that fitbit actually collects useful data, it makes you work too hard to get it.  The IT doesn't seem to have gotten any better for many, many months.

[mack05]

Sent from my iPhone

[pgkrotky]

I'm also very disappointed in the tracking of sleep.  Fitbit is unable to add the sleeps in a single night to get the overall time.  All it takes is a gap of a few minutes.  Shame.  Even a function to allow you to manually add sleeps would suffice.  Is that really so difficult?

Also, inconsistencies between the Android app and the Dashboard - how hard can this be?  If this is not fixed soon (matter of days) I will be dumping my Fitbit and making sure everyone I know is aware of these limitations.

I would describe my Charge HR as a cool "toy" - shy of being really useful, but the gap to get there is not large. by my estimation - just appears to be a lack of leadership and execution.  Looks like a company run by teenagers.

Many great posts here, so no need to repeat all the problems, but the heartbeat algorithms are a bit flaky, especially for the resting hear rate, the stair climbing is also very poor - I was kayaking and somehow magically, I was climbing stairs - WOW.  Is anyone paying attention?

Trusting you care enough to respond, by fixing these things, not just take all our money and run.

[Sunnylane]

I hate to hear that your having "issues" with your fit bit.  I personally have had none for over a year.   I can tell you  I also use my tredmill and to be able to get the correct step count, I put my Fit Bit One attached to or  in my sock.  It is always good to use the hand grips when walkng in the tredmill regardless of your age.

I also do some floor exercises as in sissor kicks,  crunches, twists and I always keep my fit bit one on my sneaker. It is very active exercise.

I hope this helps

[Sunnylane]

I respectfully disagree, I am not a huge computer geek and I too was a bit intimadated with the getting to know my Fit Bit process.  It took me a few hours but I was able to figure it out.  There is also a Help tab to get guidance.   Good Luck 🙂

[DCAustin]

Sunny, The issue with the sleep statistics is a well known problem that has not been fixed.  For people who bought their Fitbit to help them get more sleep, it is very fristrating because it give you very wrong averages, with no way of fixing it.  😞  

[rc3]

Yes, bug in the code within the separate groups of software engineers...and they can't either spend the money to give us what we have paid for (especially in Premium), or create a work-around. As far as I can tell, there has been no attempt to correct this. Whether on computer, whatever op system, tablet, cell phone, etc., this is the one feature that will bite Fitbit in their future sales and value. Simple.

OK. Now for the work-around. FITBIT, ARE YOU LISTENING????

Create ANOTHER report based on the Android Dashboard. I assume that iOS is similar. The PC dashboard does not ADD the daily sleep portions together, nor does it give you any history, which the Android dashboard does. THEN when this report is created, like the Android, you will find the previous days sleep sessions all added up for you, and you will be able to go backwards a bit, maybe 3 months. 

After Fitbit CREATES this new REPORT, they can finally flesh it out and bring over the other data (within a reasonable time, informing us of their progress), that we are getting now, which is worthless historically. Then get rid of the incompetent sleep reporting that has been foisted on use for the last 3 years. Premium is absolutely worthless without historical sleep totals reporting. WHO'S IN CHARGE OVER THERE???? 

If this report is not created, if this problem is not corrected, my Fitbit Surge and Charges are going in the trash and I will purchase the best competitors tracker, with the reports that work for me and not the other way around.

Rennie Coleman

[jennablaze]

There are actually articles on Fitbits helping people to manage symptoms of medical conditions. For someone with insomnia it can be important and based off of the fact that it is a feature fitbit already supports, I don't see why it would be a problem to simply expand the detail within the coding of the software. Yes, it is a $99.00 pedomiter. I have both the versa and the Ionic so I never have to take it off and I am able to switch depending on my look or work outlook for the day and love them both. But it should be a simple coding adjustment.