One device to rule them all: BPM and sleep tracking

November 12, 2024 8:56 AM

For reasons, it's important for me to track my beats-per-minute and sleep. To date, I've done that by using an Oura Ring to monitor sleep and a Fitbit for BPM. The Oura ring just bit the dust and rather than replace it, I'd rather buy one device- ring or watch- that does both well. Any suggestions?

Things I value or need include:

- Fast and accurate BPM tracking. Doesn't need to be perfect. The fitbit's level of accuracy and speed was fine. But with the Oura ring I needed to stay still and wait several minutes to get a value and those values felt hinky.

- Sleep data that is fairly accurate around night wakings, fall-asleep time, deep sleep/REM/Light sleep, and resting heart rate overnight. The Oura Ring is amazing at this.

-I don't care if I have to use an app for the sleep info but the BPM needs to be visually available.

-I don't care about steps or other fitness indicators but they aren't a problem.

- I'm happy with a ring, watch, or something else as long as it can do both. Does such a thing exist?

posted by jeszac to Health & Fitness (16 answers total)

I've been very happy with my whoop. There is usually a sale around black Friday/cyber Monday. Unfortunately, it does not have a visible BPM and you have to use an app, so maybe not enough for your purposes.
posted by ch1x0r at 9:06 AM on November 12

Apple Watch does both. I haven't tried to independently verify the values it produces, though. When it comes to sleep, I know that it doesn't pick up on short (<2 hours?) naps, if that matters to you.
posted by praemunire at 9:06 AM on November 12

I've been pretty happy with my Garmin watch. It tracks your sleep and BPM, but you need to use the app to see the detailed information and I don't know how it's accuracy is vs the oura on sleep.
posted by Art_Pot at 9:09 AM on November 12 [2 favorites]

I was a Fitbit user for years and recently switched to a Garmin. I’m really happy with it. Different models have different features, but my Forerunner 165 shows both heartrate and sleep on the watch.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:18 AM on November 12

I've got an Apple watch and recently started using it to track my sleep. I know that its HR is accurate compared to HRM chest bands I've used. I have no way of assessing the accuracy of the sleep tracking but it doesn't seem obviously wrong.

One quirk is that you need to either set a sleep schedule (which Apple nudges you toward) or manually set sleep/awake modes. Unlike praemunire, I've found that it will guess when I've gone to sleep for a nap without putting it in sleep mode, but doesn't try to assign deep/core/REM levels in those cases. Maybe it's a matter of which series of watch you have. This seems like a philosophical difference between Apple watches and Fitbits. A Fitbit notices what you're doing and track it. An Apple watch notices what you're doing but requires explicit confirmation to track it. It's the same when going for a walk.
posted by adamrice at 9:29 AM on November 12

I use an Apple Watch for this and the Auto Sleep app is better at detecting sleep than the built in sleep tracking, although I think they’ve made some improvements to how the native app works in the last year or two. The Auto Sleep app automatically tracks sleep and naps and is pretty accurate imo, even for short naps. I have noticed that the native app closely matches the app recently but haven’t checked it for naps, and I never tell my Watch I’m sleeping and don’t have a sleep schedule set up.
posted by MadamM at 9:50 AM on November 12 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I sold my oura and bought an apple watch recently. The watch is not nearly as good for sleep tracking but it is definitely good at heart rate tracking. I'm surprised you found the oura to be bad at that because mine was pretty good. Might be an issue with incorrect sizing? It's also possible you had an older version, in which case you might consider sticking with the oura.
posted by dbx at 10:15 AM on November 12

Also worth mentioning that the oura monitors blood oxygen and the (new) apple watch doesn't. Some of the reasons for wanting good sleep tracking also benefit from that info.
posted by dbx at 10:18 AM on November 12

My Fitbit shows bpm on the device and the sleep info you mention in the app. I’m not sure why you need anything else since your Fitbit isn’t broken. Perhaps you have a model that doesn’t track bpm and sleep?
posted by meijusa at 10:48 AM on November 12 [2 favorites]

There's an app called Autosleep for the Apple watch that solves some of the annoying problems listed above: No need to set a schedule and with the app it will catch naps.
posted by miscbuff at 11:50 AM on November 12

My recent-model Fitbit is reasonably good at sleep tracking. In general when I wake up feeling like I got an exceptionally shitty or exceptionally great night of sleep, it concurs.
posted by potrzebie at 1:48 PM on November 12

Fitbit Versa III (I think) tracks both and is $70. IMO Fitbit customer service is garbage, so I switched to a Garmin Vivosmart which is mostly slightly worse in every way than Fitbit (except customer service). You can find them both for around $100 or less.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:41 PM on November 12

Best answer: I love my garmin forerunner 265. One of my big frustrations with the apple watch was the battery life - I had to charge it almost every day, so I rarely used it at night to sleep. (This may be less of an issue if you aren't worried about activity tracking which is a drain on batteries.) It also took awhile to fully charge.

With my garmin, I just stick it on the charger while I shower. Maybe one slightly longer charge once a week. And that's with wearing it 24/7 and doing an hour or more of activity tracking most days (i.e. workouts).

I have been happy with garmin sleep tracking. It generally does a good charge of tracking when I wake up and stuff like that.

So if sleep tracking is important, I would really take battery life into consideration.

Also, I find the garmin watch to be much lighterweight and more comfortable to wear compared to my apple watch.
posted by litera scripta manet at 3:27 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

Please add the keywords "heartbeat" and "monitor" to this thread. Thank you!
posted by intermod at 4:23 PM on November 12 [1 favorite]

I have an older Garmin, a vivoactive 4, and I know there are attachments that make it better at this stuff, but as-is I have to say it is not brilliant at analyzing my sleep - I have literally gotten up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and the next day it reported I had uninterrupted sleep.
posted by solotoro at 9:40 AM on November 13

I have a low-end garmin watch (vivosmart 5) and I like it a lot. It does both of those things reliably and I don't have any complaints about it after 1.5 years of wearing it 24/7. I really like that it rarely needs charging, maybe once a week or less, and as a bonus, I love its find my phone feature for finding where I set down my (always silenced) phone a million times a day.

That said, I'm not sure how the sleep accuracy compares to the oura, and it sometimes measures lying down as "light sleep" for me even when I definitely wasn't asleep (not sure how typical this is). Other than that it seems accurate though, as far as sleep time/REM/etc and the number is usually fairly close to how tired I feel.
posted by randomnity at 7:42 AM on November 14