Most wearables are good at telling when you're asleep. They're much worse at telling when you're awake: if you lie still, many devices count it as sleep. Sleep stages land somewhere in between. And Apple, Oura, Garmin, Whoop and Fitbit all build their scores differently, so the same night can get very different numbers.
Anna D. Zych, PhD, a neuroscientist and Health Science Lead at Momentum, goes through all of this in a webinar that premieres Wednesday, 7 October at 16:00 CET. It covers what good sleep actually looks like, how wearables compare to a sleep lab across ten devices, and how to approach building sleep scoring models.
If you're building anything with sleep or recovery data, it should be a useful hour. Everyone who signs up gets the recording too.
Quick update for anyone who followed the Open Wearables launch.
We just published the second edition of our Wearables Integration Playbook. It's the written version of what we learned building the platform and seeing it run in production.
Mine says 68 today. Green zone apparently. But 68 out of what? Compared to what baseline? Why 68 and not 71? Should I train hard or take it easy? The app doesn't say. It just shows me the number and a vague color.
Most wearables give you a score with zero explanation of how they got there. Black box. Proprietary algorithm, tuned for some average user that probably isn't you. You either trust it or you don't, but you have no way to verify it either way.
