Fitbit Just Made Your Sleep Tracking Scores Worse, For A Good Reason

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Fitbit has announced it has improved how sleep tracking works in its wearables.

A member of the Fitbit team posted over at the company’s community forums about changes made to sleep tracking. And they’re already in action.

The aim is to make Fitbits’ sleep tracking more accurate by noticing more moments of wakefulness overnight.

Fitbit’s moderator noted owners of Fitbits may already have noticed their sleep score changing a little, and getting worse.

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“If you’ve noticed that your sleep stages, sleep time and awake time have changed recently, you’re seeing our latest improvement in action,” says the Fitbit spokesperson.

“You may see your awake time increase slightly as we now capture brief awakenings the old system missed.”

While Fitbit already had among the better mainstream wearable sleep tracking anyway, I find missing wakeful moments one of the most frustrating elements of sleep tracking. After all, you can’t really tell whether you were in a REM or deep sleep stage at a particular time. But you can tell whether you were awake or not.

Even now I find high-end Garmin watches often miss these moments, sometimes even when they involve a brief trip to the toilet.

Fitbit has not specified which models get this upgrade, suggesting it’s a change to the underlying algorithmic system used to translate sensor data into sleep tracking. And therefore the change should apply to all supported models.

Some users over at the Fitbit Community forums are complaining about missing sleep data, though, including the loss of historical data.

Fitbit is yet to reply to these queries, but I have asked a Fitbit representative for more information on the issue, and if the change does indeed apply to all supported Fitbit wearables.

The Future Of Fitbits

There’s more too. Fitbit says this algorithmic tweak is just the beginning.

“This is the first step in a series of upcoming improvements to improving our sleep tracking,” says Fitbit.

We may learn more later this month. On August 20, Fitbit owner Google is holding a Pixel 10 launch event, at which we may also hear about the next Pixel Watch. And it could well benefit from the same sleep tracking changes Fitbit references.

Then again, a recent report suggested the Pixel Watch 4, alongside the upcoming Pixel Buds 2a and Pixel 10 Fold Pro, may be delayed until October.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean Google won’t talk about these devices later this month, though.