isMainSleep for to measure wear compliance in a research study?

[cwebster_nymbly]

I know a lot of folks on here are using the Fitbit for research studies, curious if anyone has tried this before. We're doing a sleep-based research study and asking our participants to wear their Fitbit all the time, but it's most important for them to wear it at night. 

I'm thinking of asking our developers to pull isMainSleep on a daily basis for each participant as a simplified compliance metric. I know it's not foolproof (some edge cases listed below), but wanting to find a simple way to keep an eye on things without having to pull something more complex (like intraday heart rate data compared to activity logging and/or sedentary minutes, etc). 

Thoughts? Opinions?

Edge cases:

1. Someone wears the fitbit but doesn't go to sleep at all
2. Someone stays really still and relaxed for > 1 hour (meditating?) could log a "sleep" without it really being sleep
3. Someone is logging sleep properly but they haven't synced their device in a while

(I'm sure there are others)

[JohnFitbit · Accepted solution]

Hi @cwebster_nymbly 

Here's a link to our publication library compiled of documents shared by researchers that used Fitbit devices for their sleep studies. Hopefully you'll find some useful information here: https://healthsolutions.fitbit.com/research-library/?term=&studyTypes=&areasOfInterest=Sleep&devices...

It's completely possible for the device to detect sleep where motion has not been detected in over 1 hr. You could be watching TV or meditating as you've said. Typically, for these scenarios, the Fitbit user could delete any logs that were falsely recorded as sleep. I would probably ask your participants to keep an eye out for these false positives and delete logs as necessary to help provide more accurate data for your study.

Fitbit devices store intraday totals for up to 7 days, whereas daily totals will be stored for 30 days. We recommend that users sync at least once a day or once a week to prevent any data loss. 

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any additional questions.