Sleep Score: Now more transparent, holistic, and actionable for public preview users

[StefanieFitbit]

Hey Fitbit Community,

Imagine having a personal sleep expert who doesn't just give you a grade, but helps you better understand how to wake up feeling more refreshed. To help you reach your rest goals, we’re evolving the Sleep Score to work hand-in-hand with Coach’s insights.

While the Sleep Score has always provided a snapshot of your night, this update goes deeper. By combining advanced science with personalized guidance, we’re helping you with actionable advice that will help improve your sleep health.

What’s new?

Sleep Score has always been designed to reflect the quality of your night – but a single number can only tell part of the story.

This updated experience is designed to make the Sleep Score:

• More transparent and actionable: It shows you exactly which metrics contributed to your score, making it easier to see what you may want to focus on over time.
• More holistic: It assesses the full spectrum of your sleep quality, from falling into sound sleep to restlessness, or interruptions. Our updated algorithms now also unify your night into a single, continuous journey, providing a score intended to reflect how well you slept.

Instead of just seeing that your score changed, you can now get a clearer sense of how different aspects of your sleep contributed – and where you might want to focus your attention.

Note: Your Sleep Score on your device may not match the new Sleep Score you’re seeing in the app. This is a known issue that we’re planning to fix soon. In the meantime, the Sleep Score in your app is the most accurate.

See exactly what makes up your score

The updated Sleep experience is designed to make it easier to quickly understand what stood out about your sleep. You will no longer have to guess why your score changed – you can see exactly which part of your sleep impacted the result.

1. Total sleep duration: This makes up the majority of the score and represents how much time you were estimated to be asleep during your primary sleep window for the day. We consider any time that you were likely asleep to be part of your sleep duration.
2. Time to sound sleep: This is the time it takes from when you first appear to get to bed until the moment your body fully settles into Deep, REM, or a steady phase of Light sleep with a calm heart rate. Usually, the faster you settle in, the better you’ll feel.
3. Sound sleep: This is one of a few descriptions of how your sleep looked, reflecting the total amount of steady, undisturbed sleep you got. We add up all the moments during your sleep period where your body appears to be soundly asleep (Deep/REM/Light with low, steady HR).
4. Restlessness: The time you were likely asleep, but moving, stirring, or in a transitional/wake-like state. We add up all the very brief, minor wakeful moments that happen while you are asleep. We exclude longer, memorable awakenings that are less than five minutes. Reducing these "active" moments leads to a better score. 
5. Interruptions: This is the total time you appeared fully awake during the night. We look for longer, likely memorable moments of wakefulness rather than tiny, natural stirs.
6. Full awakenings: This is the number of distinct, memorable times you woke up for at least five minutes. Fewer interruptions lead to a better Sleep Score, with zero being the ideal.

Usually, your awake time and the number of awakenings are grouped together under Interruptions.

We’ll split this into separate metrics – interruptions and full awakenings – if one specifically falls outside of your typical range. 

 

Fitbit Premium users can turn data into a plan(1)

A score is only useful if you know how to move the needle. Your new experience includes Personalized Insights and guidance from the Coach (available with a Premium membership) to help you target specific habits:

• Targeted insights: If your "Time to Sound Sleep" is consistently high, your app won't just show you a graph, you’ll also receive an insight suggesting changes to your wind-down routine – like putting screens away 30 minutes earlier or trying a guided breathing exercise.
• Guidance from the Coach: When you’re looking at your score and wondering "Why is this lower than yesterday?", you can turn to the coach. For example, the coach might point out that a highly active day or a late-afternoon nap shifted your body's sleep requirements for the night.

Note: If you ask your Coach about your new Sleep Score, you may receive inaccurate details regarding your Sleep Score sub-metrics. This is a known issue, and we’re working to resolve it soon.

"We’ve all had those mornings where we wake up and just know we’ve had a great night’s sleep - it’s an ineffable feeling of satisfaction that a rigid formula can’t always capture. 

To bridge that gap, we’ve evolved the Sleep Score to move away from a one-size-fits-all definition of 'healthy sleep' and toward an estimate of how well you slept. 

Having thousands of users literally tell us how they felt they slept by completing scientifically validated surveys after waking up, we could task our cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms with sorting out how our metrics related to people’s general sleep perceptions. 

We wanted to be able to passively capture this important dimension of sleep health, by acknowledging that you know good sleep when you've had it. 

By taking into account sleep satisfaction we hope to round out how we promote healthy sleep practices, by incorporating the experience of sleep into a broader sleep health framework, one centered on regularly getting adequate amounts of high-quality, uninterrupted sleep at a biologically aligned time to feel and function your best while awake."

Logan Schneider, 
Clinical Lead for Sleep Health, Google
Adjunct Clinical Assoc Prof of Sleep Medicine @ Stanford
Neurologist @ Stanford/VA Alzheimer's Research Center

What’s next?

Because of these updates to how the Sleep Score captures your unique sleep experience – including how we unify your sleep sessions together and account for perceived sleep quality – you might notice your score shift to a new baseline.

Think of this as a higher-definition view of your rest. By capturing a more detailed and complete picture of your night, your score now offers a more accurate reflection of your personal patterns. This shift allows Fitbit to go beyond simply tracking your sleep and start identifying the real habits that shape how rested you feel.

Because the most useful Sleep Score isn’t just one that tells you how you slept – it’s one that helps you truly understand the quality of your rest.

Disclaimers 
Not intended for medical purposes. Sleep tracking features are not intended to diagnose or treat any medical conditions and should not be relied on for medical purposes. It is intended to provide information that can help you manage your well-being. Consult your health care professional before making changes regarding your health. 

1. Requires Fitbit Premium subscription (sold separately), Fitbit app, and internet connection. Features subject to change; availability varies. Not intended for medical purposes. Gemini features work independently of Gemini apps. Check responses for accuracy; results may vary.