[HN Gopher] Study uses wearables to show that physical activity ...
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Study uses wearables to show that physical activity lengthens REM
latency
Author : gmays
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-04-02 17:58 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.utexas.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.utexas.edu)
| jeffbee wrote:
| I tried wearing my Garmin to bed for a while, but the information
| just wasn't that interesting. I can see where science gets value
| out of a population study but for the N=1 population consisting
| of yourself, I just wasn't seeing the point.
| creaghpatr wrote:
| I enjoyed getting the metrics (not sure how accurate they were)
| but my garmin is so clunky it's impossible to sleep in. Great
| for everything else.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I wear the women's model of the smallest one they make for
| this exact reason. Most of the watches Garmin is making are
| just ridiculously big.
| phildenhoff wrote:
| On the contrary, I've been wearing my Apple Watch nearly 24
| hours a day for a few years and find the sleep info extremely
| useful.
|
| Really, the primary benefit I get is twofold:
|
| 1. I know approximately how long I slept for and remind myself
| of that all day via a widget. A short sleep is common for me,
| but I end up feeling foggy. Being reminded that it's OK, I had
| a poor sleep, helps ease my mind.
|
| 2. I see approximately when I fell asleep and when I woke up. I
| end up having to add extra time if I sleep past my alarm, but
| seeing that I didn't really fall asleep until late into the
| night helps me manage the pattern of late nights.
|
| Both of those are easily covered by even semi-diligently
| tracking your sleep on paper, but having my watch do it for me
| is what I like!
| ScoobleDoodle wrote:
| > I end up having to add extra time if I sleep past my alarm
|
| I find this one a painful design decision on the Apple team's
| part. The end time of the normal desired sleep schedule does
| not mean the literal end of sleep every day. I wish they
| wouldn't clip the data at the end of the sleep schedule.
| Maybe it's because they're using heuristics and so all the
| data is guesstimates?
| ra7 wrote:
| I find the Autosleep app to be much more accurate than the
| Watch's native sleep tracking.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Mine was absolute crap at sleep detection. Typically it would
| report that I fell asleep before I went to bed, or I was
| asleep longer than I was in bed.
|
| Heart rate detection and so on was generally fine through the
| night, as was Hrv. I sort of wonder if the actual sleep
| detection is done on the phone, and if the phone is not
| nearby, it just fails. (My phone doesn't go to the bedroom.
| Makes it far easier to actually sleep)
|
| (Also, Watch is dead now, and didn't replace it, so I might
| be misremembering the exact bits, but the results were
| generally paradoxical)
| _qua wrote:
| I used to be someone who might have a single beer with dinner a
| few nights per week. When I got a Garmin and saw what it did to
| my stress levels and sleep, I essentially stopped drinking at
| all except for rare social situations.
|
| In addition to improving the numbers, I noticed a qualitative
| improvement in my sleep, energy levels, and exercise recovery.
| esel2k wrote:
| What are measurements for stress levels? Are they accurate
| enough?
| p_j_w wrote:
| I may be wrong, but I think it's just heart rate and heart
| rate variability.
| occz wrote:
| I find that I can pretty consistently see an increase in
| resting heart rate by several beats per minute the day
| after drinking, an elevated skin temperature and a
| reduction in Deep- and REM-sleep. Particularly heavy
| drinking will manifest itself as a large drop in heart rate
| variability.
| nradov wrote:
| Garmin wearable devices display a proprietary stress metric
| from their Firstbeat Analytics subsidiary. This is
| basically just heart rate variability (HRV) normalized to
| the user's baseline.
|
| https://www.firstbeatanalytics.com/en/features/all-day-
| stres...
|
| As for accuracy, compared to what? Any definition of
| "stress" is inherently somewhat arbitrary and subjective.
| There seems to be a decent correlation to how I'm feeling.
| But the metric isn't really actionable for most people.
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| Whether the measurements are accurate enough is not clear,
| but they are certainly precise enough. I (and all my
| friends) can easily see huge differences in HRV on nights
| of drinking, it's pretty amazing.
| Aromasin wrote:
| I had the same experience. It puts things into circumspect
| when you can physically see how erratic things like heart
| rate and sleep stage times differ with just a single drink.
| The difference for my was so stark you'd think it were a bug
| if it weren't for the fact I could spot the pattern and test
| to see the truth of things.
| jeffbee wrote:
| OK but once you've learned this fact (that I think you
| could have learned from numerous sources without any
| technology), what is the ongoing value of the sleep
| tracker? I feel it is in the category of things that you
| learn from but then stop needing, including a cadence meter
| on a bicycle, bathroom scales, and similar devices.
| DefineOutside wrote:
| I find my Apple Watch information useful. I don't remember when
| I fell asleep but my apple watch does. This keeps me honest
| about going to be too late.
|
| Additionally, when I first got it, I found that I was only
| getting 40 minutes of deep sleep which is why I was always
| somewhat tired. After adding magnesium to my diet I am getting
| around 70 minutes of deep sleep. I wouldn't have been able to
| pinpoint this without the data. The apple watch is the best
| sleep tracker [1] so your data might be too noisy to find
| results.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/LPqtfC70QTU?si=6tTayfNCkcJwDayW&t=12m30s
| greymalik wrote:
| Does Watch accurately capture when you fell asleep, as
| opposed to when you lay down and stopped moving?
| DefineOutside wrote:
| Not that well. You have to extrapolate from when the first
| first deep sleep occurs in comparison to other nights.
| aaronrobinson wrote:
| It is interesting but I find Garmin data completely unreliable.
| For example, it claims I'm awake for 2-3 times each night for
| 30 minutes or more, it claims I'm asleep when I know I was on
| Tik Tok because I couldn't sleep.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I had the same experience when I first started sleep tracking
| before beginning our start-up https://affectablesleep.com.
|
| My oura would tell me I didn't get enough deep sleep, or REM
| sleep, and I was like - so what? What do I do with that
| information?
|
| We're using auditory stimulation to increase the efficiency of
| deep sleep during the night. The data after a night of sleep is
| less valuable than the real-time intervention.
| dsalzman wrote:
| This is one of the great "no shit" type studies. Good to validate
| basic and ancient wisdom I guess.
| phildenhoff wrote:
| First you validate the no shit, and then you can ask why!
| hattmall wrote:
| lol, the why is also no shit too though in this case....
| because you are tired.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Some sequence of studies are not meant to validate that an
| effect exists, but to quantify the size of the effect. And the
| size of the effect under varying circumstances.
| shawnz wrote:
| What? Exercise decreasing the proportion of sleep spent in the
| REM phase is "basic and ancient wisdom"?
|
| Exercise improving sleep quality, sure, but this study is
| saying something much more specific than that
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| From this study I don't think it's even clear why or under
| what conditions higher REM latency is better, or that
| increasing it in an individual can necessarily be considered
| an improvement.
|
| (I also don't think that's what the study was for; I think
| they were mostly trying to validate the methods against
| established results.)
| kingrazor wrote:
| This doesn't surprise me. A personal anecdote: a couple of years
| ago I traveled to Japan for the first time. During my time there,
| I walked much, much more than I usually do. As a result, I was
| physically exhausted at the end of each day, and had some of the
| best sleep I've had in years.
| fkkffdddd wrote:
| If you're missing that now - perhaps a great opportunity.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Personal anecdote: when strength training, I find that I have the
| best sleeps on the night and second night after I do a session of
| heavy farmer walks/carries. They are one of the most exhausting
| exercises for me and great sleep is a good reward.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| Wrist watches can't really detect sleep stages. That requires at
| least an EEG to do reliably. The best they can do is maybe
| distinguish between sleeping vs awake. The only consumer device
| with an EEG is the Zeo, unfortunately they went bankrupt and
| people are unable to distinguish the flukes from the real ones.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25991187/
| cassianoleal wrote:
| There was the Dreem 2 as well but they have also ended
| production.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Heh my SO just showed me her Garmin-something tracker log the
| other day, and it showed her having an hour of deep sleep when
| she'd been lying on the couch watching TV.
|
| It's also showing various sleep stages whens he knows she's
| been awake, trying to sleep.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > It's also showing various sleep stages whens he knows she's
| been awake, trying to sleep.
|
| To be fair, people actually aren't that great at detecting
| when they (or others) are really sleeping. Especially for
| one's self, it's common to believe that you spent more of the
| night tossing and turning than you really did, when in
| reality you actually got some light sleep sprinkled in those
| periods.
|
| That said, consumer-grade wearable devices are demonstrably
| not great at this either.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I love Garmin watches for many reasons, but their sleep
| tracking is horrible. Even my ancient MS Band did a better
| job than my Garmin Fenix 6
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| It's pretty awful. Though they seem to be capable of
| detecting terrible sleep, at least. Gotta love a 40 sleep
| score night.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Agreed. But it can't tell if I'm jet-lagged and I wake up
| 3 hours into my sleep at 2:30 am and lay there still, yet
| unable to get back to sleep. That is sometimes an 80
| sleep score night, when really it should be a 40.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| That study is nearly ten years old and almost certainly not
| relevant anymore.
|
| The Basis Peak did a good job at tracking sleep but they got
| bought up and killed off by Intel for god knows what reason.
| The Peak also did automatic activity detection and it was quite
| good at it.
|
| Basis also had hands-down the best visualization of activity
| and sleep trends, and was the only watch at the time to do full
| time HRM.
|
| They claimed the Peak watches were a fire risk and recalled
| them, probably to have a reason to get rid of all the back end
| infrastructure.
|
| Garmin still can't reliably autodetect biking and its sleep
| tracking is pretty terrible, too.
| jeremiemyhren wrote:
| I miss the Zeo. The app would still work locally long after
| they shut the backend down, until there just was no more
| aftermarket / eBay supply of their unique silver coated contact
| padded headbands that actually did the brainwave monitoring. I
| do find the Apple Watch Ultra seems to be close to at least
| being in the ballpark in terms of stage and duration accuracy
| as its output is comparable to what I last got with Zeo, albeit
| 10 years ago.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| This review channel begs to differ:
| https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist/videos
|
| He very throughly compares countless models with a Polar H10
| strap. Some come close enough.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Wrist watches can 't really detect sleep stages._
|
| As someone else noted, the paper you linked to is from 2015.
| Apple Watch couldn't do it until watchOS 9 (2022, 7 years
| later), but can now do this pretty reliably.
|
| You might find the "Algorithm Development and Validation"
| section of this whitepaper interesting:
| https://www.apple.com/healthcare/docs/site/Estimating_Sleep_...
| pkoird wrote:
| Thanks for linking this. I always did wonder how they did it.
| From a cursory read, it looks like the basic approach is to
| collect accelerometer data and train it to predict ground
| truth labels generated via a consumer EEG device. Not sure if
| each epochs (30s) were considered iids. I'd assume that the
| overall sequence of activity would be much more informative
| than a single 30s activity considered independently.
| cj wrote:
| Sometimes at work I'm concentrating so hard my Apple Watch
| logs a sleep session...
|
| Definitely not 100% accurate but as someone who checks
| their sleep log (and time in each stage using the Pillow
| app) daily, it seems pretty accurate and I can correlate
| how I feel on a given day back to that day's sleep report
| with pretty good correlation.
|
| Definitely not perfect but better than nothing.
|
| If you've ever been on medication that suppresses REM
| sleep, Apple Watch detects REM rebound very clearly.
| pedalpete wrote:
| The data quality of wearables to detect sleep stages is in the
| 90%+ accuracy range now. Which is near what polysomnographers
| score at - nobody completely agrees on what stage is what,
| there is always deviation. Wearables are definitely good enough
| at this stage.
|
| Zeo is not the only consumer EEG either, though all the current
| headbands (including what we are building at
| https://affectablesleep.com) have some sort of sleep
| stimulation at it's core.
|
| Frenzband I believe is shipping, I haven't tried one, and don't
| know anyone who has. We have a Somnee at the office, and it is
| unbearably painful to wear. I'm highly skeptical of the
| "science" of either of these devices as well.
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