Seattle Forrest

I've noticed that more people are wearing smart watches lately, both in person and in reading what people have to say here. There was a thread recently and the Venu line from Garmin, where I think the overall sentiment was that it's a nice piece of tech but not good at sleep tracking.

I saw an article in Washington Post about wearable sleep tracking and thought people in here might get something out of this. You can read or listen to the article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...le-sleep-data/

Polaris OBark

I'm being trolled.

Polaris OBark

and paywalled.

Brave browser for the win!

Seattle Forrest

Weird, you're the second person to say that about a pay wall. I guess I haven't used all my free articles yet.

Troul 

that link & a few others are paywalls. IMO, it's not "freedom of the press" if the public information can be held back by a subscription fee.

Troul 

FYI: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ran...news-websites/

Seattle Forrest

Clear your cookies or use a different browser.

Troul 

not as simple as that.

I'll just be left in the dark more often.

tubesocksFred

All you have to do paste the title of the article in goog1e and you can click the article without encountering a paywall. That is how goog1e gets them, "Use me to have your article noticed (and I server my ads) and have people read it, or be in the dark".

Otherwise install the Bypass Paywalls add-on, all the paywalls will have suddenly disappeared. It simulates a referral from goog1e, so those paywall'd websites automatically let you in.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass...ster/README.md

Koyote

Thanks for posting, Seattle Forrest . I got an Apple Watch last month, and have been trying to understand how to interpret the sleep data -- and that article helped. Though I'm still a little fuzzy on the Heart Rate Variability thing.

Polaris OBark

At about 9:30 last night, we had (yet another) unexplained power outage. I can't really sleep at all when this happens, mainly due to the idiot neighbors who run their generators all night long, no air movement, white noise, etc. So I thought this would be a nice test of the Garmin Venu 2 sleep tracking. I think all the raw data are reasonably accurate. The problem (as the WaPo article reiterates) is that the software is making an indirect inference from stuff like movement, breathing rate, blood oxygen, etc. In this case I got up and switched beds twice, got up and let the dogs out, and all sorts of other things. I hardly got any sleep and felt like crap all day. I know I was awake because I heard generators run out of gas (a delightful sound I might add), and I heard when our power was finally restored. There is no chance in hell I got a decent night's sleep by any metric. I've taken to leaving the watch off at night, since this really doesn't tell me jack diddly, Bo Diddley, or Jack Shyte.

Polaris OBark

This works really well. Thank you. Now I can read the NYT and Washington Post without downloading every article. It also works in Brave, which gives the best of both worlds (no advertisements).

Polaris OBark

Have you found a way to get it to broadcast heart rate?

Koyote

Broadcast? Not sure what you mean. I know you can choose it as a watch face complication.

If you're trying to simply turn on the HR measurement, go into the Watch app (you can do it on your phone): Settings --> Privace --> Health --> Heart Rate. Then the Health app will record your HR, including while sleeping. And you can display it as a complication on a watch face.

Polaris OBark

Sorry. Send heart rate to your Garmin (or other device) as if it were a wrist band monitor. (I went with a Garmin watch a few weeks ago instead, because I thought Apple Watches can't do this.)

Seattle Forrest

​​​​​​In theory, HRV is the only thing you need to know to calculate everything about everything. It encodes the patterns of the universe and from this you can glean all your data. Firstbeat is a Finnish (?) company that makes software that's embedded in a lot of consumer devices. All Garmins, a lot of other wearables, possibly Apple Watches? They write white papers about how they use HRV for sleep and other features, but they're kind of vague.

I'm still a little fuzzy on the HRV thing, too, in other words. 🙂

Optical HRMs can't actually measure HRV. They're making educated guesses.

The all day / background stress feature works very well for me. It's based on HRV (from the wrist). The sleep feature doesn't. It gets my bedtime right, but it doesn't know when I'm trying to sleep and not moving but can't fall asleep.