Which devices do you have experience with and how do you like them?
I use my vivioactive watch. Its ok but it tends sometimes to include the end of my day sat awake on the sofa or awake in bed as sleep. Usually that is not included in its first reading but as my day progresses it is added 
For example I had to get up early yesterday and couldn’t sleep the night before and first off it was saying 5h34min which sounds accurate but now its saying 7h34m
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I have a garmin vivoactive 4…it does ok but doesnt track naps…I often feel like it doesnt track time awake at night…if you lie still it thinks you are sleeping.
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I’ve used an AppleWatch for the last few years. Works well with the app AutoSleep. I have not needed or wanted anything more than what is provided through AutoSleep.
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I’ve been using the Whoop strap since around
8 months and I’m very happy with it.
It’s not 100% accurate but it is still useful, and it may not be accurate day to day, but over the course of several days it is great.
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I use Sleep Cycle app on my phone. Good enough for duration, interruptions, and quality. And it’s free. I manually add the data to Training Peaks each morning. Takes 30 seconds.
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Another Whoop user and it works very well for me as a sleep tracker (and otherwise). For me, its uncanny how good it is at recognizing when sleep starts and ends. It even handles my regular old man middle of the night potty trips. As for the intra-sleep data the app reports, I’m asleep so I don’t know what’s really happening with my REM sleep et al but the basic night’s score matches well with how I feel.
Its also easy and unobtrusive to wear at night. The battery lasts about 4-5 days and you charge it with a battery pack while wearing it so its very easy to just keep it on 24/7. I don’t know its there until I want it to be there.
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I use the Oura ring. Love it. super low key but when people “who know” see it always brings up a good convo… I’ve had it for a few years now and i looked at the data (sleep time and stages, avg HRM and HRV’s, temp too) but never really let it rule my workouts or days. Then this past weekend I raced a 50 miler gravel/mtb on a course that i knew well and had one of the slowest times despite a clean run at it (no mechanicals, etc). I was scratching my head on what happened and then looked at my data and the recovery index the night before was really bad…which made me feel better i guess. I almost wish i would have used it to cancel the race as it was super demoralizing have that sh$%TY of a time.
The oura also claims to be an activity tracker but does an awful job at it. I also did not buy into the new subscription version and glad i did not as it looks as though they really did no improve it that much and looking for the same money grab that the whoop has.
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I don’t suppose the data from the oura can be uploaded for workouts to say strava.com?
I have just purchased a Venu SQ on clear out and it’s pretty good. I’m still working my head around what all the metrics mean, but it seems relatively accurate and tracks sleep ok at least in a general sense/trends. Same as @HLaB I find it over estimates my sleep, including time after I’m up. If I look at it first thing it seems pretty good, then can often show a decent amount more that I know wasn’t sleep (or even really rest 
).
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Not to my knowledge. Keep hearing that this is being worked on with whoop tho
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Oura is really a sleep tracker, not an activity tracker (even if they say it tracks activity.) The new ring does add some during the day HR tracking, but from what little I have looked I wouldn’t use it as a primary source of activity data.
I think it does quite well on sleep tracking, and from what I have seen they have put some work into testing and validating against medical grade sleep tracking. That said, I don’t think that the deep/light/REM amounts on any consumer level device are all that good, and are mostly guesses from movement.
Oura data is synced to interfals.icu, but that is resting HR/ HRV/recovery, etc. Honestly the lack of a good place to synthesize all of my data is I think the biggest limitation of these types of trackers. I need to look at intervals.icu in more depth now that they track recovery/sleep data from the oura.
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I’ve been using an Oura ring since December and like it primarily for the “readiness” metrics which include HRV, resting HR, respiration rate and body temp adjusted for a baseline corresponding to my body temp. I’ve learned how to look at these metrics and gauge my state of recovery or lack thereof. For me a big selling point of the Oura is how easy it is to wear. No band, nothing that gets soggy, easy to sleep with it on. My sense of the sleep accuracy is that it’s on a par with other devices, which is to say it’s susceptible to miscategorizing sleep stages. I don’t pay much attention to the sleep stats, because if my readiness stats are looking good then I figure I’m also reasonably well-rested. If you’re in the market for some sort of tracking device, I recommend giving the Oura ring a try.
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I use an Oura. I agree with the comments above that it does Ok at best as an activity tracker. It does usually pick up moving activities, even biking and things like doing chores, yard work, etc. But it does not pick up my stationer trainer rides at all. And the daytime HR on the new generation is virtually useless.
(FYI - I bought a Wahoo RIVAL watch and it does a great job of picking up HR from my wrist. I stopped even using a separate HR monitor on workouts because it was so consistent - and means I can have one less device to deal with.)
But I digress . . .
I do like Oura as a sleep tracker. I found it very helpful to pinpoint things that were compromising my recovery and sleep at night and have changed behaviors as a direct result of it. I never take it off, and I manually add my TR workouts just so I have a single source of all my general activity. As noted, it is not a medical grade device, but it seems to at least be consistent, so my trends are reliable. (And it generally relies on trends, not absolute values.)
I can’t strongly recommend upgrading to Oura “3.0” if you already have the older one. I don’t really get any added value from having dropped another $400 for the new one.
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I wear a garmin fenix 6 24/7. It’s a bit heavy/bulky to wear while sleeping but doesnt bother me too much. The sleep tracking is just ok and I’d say it gives me a general and approximate idea of sleep quality. If i wanted to monitor sleep trends more accurately probably there are better devices to use. On another note, for me, the watch does a very good job of tracking resting (sleeping) HR, but not good for tracking workout HR.
I used to own a Whoop and an Apple Watch with the Auto Sleep app, and I now wear a Fenix 6. I never notice the Fenix (it just replaces my other watches) other than when trying to wear a dress shirt (sleeves don’t fit over it). It’s more accurate at tracking my sleep than my Whoop band was and it’s uncanny how well it notices the moment you fall asleep. The Whoop was also too large to fit under a shirt sleeve and for me personally was not comfortable or accurate at tracking HR. The Apple Watch with the Auto Sleep app was just as accurate as the Fenix and Whoop, but I didn’t like having to charge it daily, and I cracked the screen. The Fenix also provides lots of other functionality that I use so I’ve stuck with it. I’m not sure I fully trust the “sleep cycle” data on any of these (how much was REM vs light vs deep).
As others have mentioned, ALL sleep trackers are only accurate to a point, and will do things like not notice naps, not track activities very accurately, or tell you you’re well rested when you feel exhausted or vice versa. My recommendation is to just buy the device that meets your lifestyle preference (ring, watch, or band) and accept that there will be days when you agree with it and days when you don’t. If I owned and loved an Apple Watch and didn’t mind charging it during the day, I would just stick to using it with the app.
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A topic that frustrates me due to not being able to find a good solution! My only concern was time asleep and I never pondered stage accuracy.
- Garmin, I’ve tried two straps (vivosport & vivosmart 4). They both count sitting around before bed as sleeping even when I put it on 2 hours before sleep as recommended. It’d also count my coffee time as sleep most mornings. Neither catch an occasional nap. Upside is the data is highly portable
- Whoop worked great and agreed with my sense of when I slept. Bad thing of the data Is locked up in their ecosystem. I’d rather have it out in health or TrainingPeaks. Advice was always non useful too, it just told me to sleep 11 hours per day. As if.
- Tried a go2sleep briefly but wasn’t confident in their proprietary, never-verified algorithms. Seemed roughly as accurate as the Garmin but I didn’t use it long
- Ordered an Oura last September but canceled during the long wait when I’d heard the update was imminent. Then they went subscription, and though it’s small, that entire sequence of events frustrated me enough I didn’t bother reordering
- Ordered another whoop after that but again canceled because I don’t like subscriptions and data being locked up outside my usual apps so this whole topic has me stumped and still don’t have a tracker.
For what it’s worth, the fitnesssyncer app links with a lot of sleep tracker companies including Fitbit, Garmin, oura, withings, and a bunch of others.
I’ve tried Oura, Whoop and Garmin (935/Fenix 2).
- Whoop, was good, relatively comfy to wear. Ultimately the subscription model, and the inaccuracy of the Gen 3 I had for activity tracking, killed it for me
- Oura, great as a sleep tracker. I’m on the fence as to whether I would recommend now with the new subscription model and they effectively stopped all user support during the Gen 3 rollout which hasn’t been hugely confidence inspiring. The Gen 3 offers nothing as an activity tracker
- Garmin, I like the body battery feature and find it reasonable accurate with how I feel. I did get slightly different sleep tracking when baselined against my Oura ring, subjectively based on feel I’d err towards the Oura ring being more accurate. But I don’t really like wearing a watch to sleep
My summary would be Oura is my preferred solution but the new pricing model makes it expensive and the complete drop during Gen 3 rollout makes me question overall corporate robustness.
Happy enough with the tracking on my Garmin 245. Not sure it really tells me much I don’t really know, but dead handy for resting heart rate. Even where I’ve got up and gone back to bed, you can override the awake time and it does seem to track the sleep phases.
I find the optical heart rate ok for running/ walking and nothing too intense on the bike (like commuting for example), but whatever way I adjust to efforts makes it not work on me.
Whoop can automatically sync basic sleep, HR and HRV data to TrainingPeaks. Https://help.trainingpeaks.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036017652-WHOOP
" At this time, TrainingPeaks imports HRV, Pulse (Resting Heart Rate (RHR)), Sleep Hours, Times Woken, Time in Deep Sleep (SWS), Time in REM Sleep, Time in Light Sleep, and Total Time Awake. We do not currently import Whoop proprietary metrics like Strain, Recovery, or Sleep performance."