Abstract
Consumer sleep tracking devices are known to be inaccurate, but there is a lack of understanding of how user characteristics may affect the accuracy of these devices. This study aims to examine the effect of age, gender, subjective sleep quality, sleep hygiene and sleep structure on the accuracy of two consumer sleep trackers, i.e. Fitbit Charge 2 and Neuroon. Sleep data were collected from 27 healthy participants using consumer devices and a medical device concurrently. Analysis found that age, sleep hygiene and sleep structure were significantly associated to the accuracy of consumer sleep trackers, whereas no association was found on gender and subjective sleep quality. Both consumer devices had improved accuracy on total sleep time and sleep efficiency for participants who had longer, deeper and less interrupted sleep. Our findings suggest that consumer devices may not be suited for young adults and for people with short and fragmented sleep.
Highlights
The proliferation of consumer sleep tracking technologies has significantly raised people’s awareness of sleep health [1,2,3]
We focused on the measurement errors overall three sleep metrics, i.e. total sleep time (TST), wake after sleep onset (WASO), and sleep efficiency (SE)
The probability of obtaining measurement errors by Fitbit significantly decreased for participants aged over 25-year-old on TST (OR = 0.05, 95% CI = 0.01-0.39, P = 0.004) and SE (OR = 0.17, 95% CI = 0.03-0.93, P = 0.041) compared to younger people
Summary
The proliferation of consumer sleep tracking technologies has significantly raised people’s awareness of sleep health [1,2,3]. Compared to polysomnography (PSG), consumer wearable devices provide low-cost and unobtrusive alternatives for individuals to monitor sleep on daily basis without the need for constant technical support. These devices offer great opportunities for researchers to conduct large-scale longitudinal studies at reasonable cost. It is important to understand whether, when and with whom these devices could produce accurate measurements In response to this need, researchers have studied the validity and reliability of popular wearable sleep trackers both in sleep laboratories [6,7,8,9,10] and under free living conditions [11, 25]. The most recent studies revealed that the latest models of consumer sleep trackers could accurately measure total sleep duration and sleep efficiency in health people, whereas detecting sleep stages remained to be the main challenge [6, 11, 25]
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