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🛌 MVP Sleep-tracking App with Step-by-Step Tutorial
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Sleep Tracking: Should we get/use a Dedicated (Wearable) Device or App (Apple Watch)? #7

Open nelsonic opened 7 years ago

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

It's no secret that I'm terrible at sleeping. if I don't fall asleep when I'm tired (e.g. I'm stressed about work) then I often stay awake till 3/4am ... if I'm woken in the middle of the night e.g. 1am I often won't be able to go back to sleep and end up just reading/working instead.

Living @ 2 Palmer's Road has been atrocious for my sleep. The intermittent traffic noise from Roman Road is loud even with fairly decent double glazing.

TODO: Upload screenshot of decibel meter reading

A bit research indicates that FitBits are still the best sleep trackers: http://www.nosleeplessnights.com/best-sleep-tracker

I was briefly tempted to buy a New FitBit Flex 2 (Waterproof) Sleep & Fitness Tracker see: https://www.fitbit.com/uk/flex2 on the basis that it's waterproof and has a much better battery life than Apple Watch ... but maybe I don't need to spend another $70 ...

this Apple Watch App appears to have good reviews: http://autosleep.tantsissa.com Going to try it out today.

iteles commented 5 years ago

Following on from this, I have been eyeing the Oura Ring for a year now.

I've been collecting sleep data for 2 years now across different devices and I'm still not quite there with my ideal amount of sleep.

There are two key factors here:

  1. I'm not consistent with the time I go to sleep (currently fixing this)
  2. There are many more factors that go into hacking your sleep (and your days depending on how your sleep was) than just length of sleep, so the 'optimum sleep' is slightly variable

The current problem I have is that with the Apple Watch, I've found AutoSleep to be the best application but even this isn't very accurate and half of the time I need to make corrections (e.g. I lie very still when I'm trying to go to sleep but if I know I heard 2 x 30 minute podcasts before I even started feeling drowsy, I know it took me more than the 10 minutes that the app predicted for me to fall asleep). For others, AutoSleep is a total disaster and records completely the wrong data.

All of this is why I've been eyeing the Oura Ring, which focuses on sleep as the highest priority, but also tracks activity throughout the day.

It:

It's not cheap, but I'm very tempted to splurge and get one for testing (with one of the many $50 discount vouchers

nelsonic commented 2 years ago

@iteles you ended up getting the Oura Ring. Want to give a quick summary of your experience using it?

iteles commented 2 years ago

NOTE: This is just about sleep, I barely ever used it for the daytime activities and it's known to be considerably less accurate than something like fitbit for the daytime portion.

I loved it. It was the most precise thing I'd used to measure sleep to date (and I had tried multiple sleep apps as well as the Apple watch). Almost everything else counted the large amount of time I'd be still in bed at the beginning of the night as 'sleep time' when in fact it was 'insomnia time'. After about 3 weeks of making adjustments with the Oura ring, it started recording that time correctly so I finally had an accurate record of my sleep hours.

It even accurately captured my absolutely terrible sleep in the last couple of months of pregnancy (white peaks are wake-ups): image

My biggest complaint before having a child was the battery life and how I had to charge it every other day.

HOWEVER, I don't use it any more. Why? Because with a kid, I'm up multiple times a night for varying (often long) periods of time and I'm as still as I can be of course. Unsurprisingly, the Oura ring can't tell the difference between that and being asleep so it counts it as sleep. And because the Oura ring only lets you adjust the beginning or end of your night and not the middle, I can't correct it. So now it just sits on the shelf until I have predictably short wake-ups again 🤷‍♀️

The cons were always:

But thanks for reminding me, I might try it again and see how it works.

iteles commented 2 years ago

A new Oura ring has just come out that addresses the issues mentioned above: image

BUT they're also introducing a new $5.99/month subscription fee. They're GIFTING this (a LIFETIME membership) anyone with an existing ring who upgrades in the next week.

So I'm in two minds because:

  1. I really really like the Oura ring form factor and the insights it gives and think that the information is just getting better. I'd love to upgrade.
  2. The subscription means I would now no longer recommend it to anyone, it's just greedy. They can't charge you €400 for hardware that costs them €50 and then also charge you a subscription of €6 a month. Pick your poison buddy.
iteles commented 2 years ago

https://ouraring.com/blog/oura-generation2-vs-generation3/

The new ring does feel like they're making an effort to approximate being the ultimate health tracker.

New features: – Adding of SpO2 (Blood Oxygen) tracking (coming in 2022) – Added daytime/semi-real-time heart rate tracking – Adding workout heart rate tracking (coming later 2021) – Significant increase in LEDs: From just infrared LED to green, red & infrared LEDs. Green for workout, red for SpO2, infrared for night tracking – Changed temperature sensor system for higher accuracy – Increased internal memory from 0.5MB to 16MB – Battery life claims at 7 days – Water-resistance claim at 100m, including saunas and ice baths

I don't know how much of the data is able to be exported. This page suggests some level of depth but I doubt it's 'everything' which is my biggest bug bear with Oura: https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025441594-Export-and-Share-Your-Oura-Data

nelsonic commented 2 years ago

@iteles the Oura Ring is an interesting one. 💭 The idea itself (an inconspicuous wearable that tracks a bunch of metrics) is really good 💡 and they have improved with each iteration. 👍

I feel that given their level of funding and the mass-appeal of the product, they could easily have brought down the price to $99 by now ... It's not like they haven't figured out product-market-fit. Why are they still price gouging?

€369 and then a €5.99/month membership seems steep to me ... https://ouraring.com/product/heritage-stealth

oura-ring-stealth-369

Even the "Black" (cheapest color) https://ouraring.com/product/heritage-black is still €264 plus €5.99/month:

oura-ring-black-264

At the scale that they have, they and the technical complexity of their product, a few LEDs/Sensors, an IC and rechargeable battery probably costs them less than €30 per ring. And the storage for the data is definitely a lot less than €1/month, it might even be €0.10/month (how much data do they actually capture/store per person?) 🤷‍♂️

Independent testing the 2nd Gen ring found it to be 59% accurate. 😕 The conclusion was that "there are more accurate sleep-tracking devices that cost a lot less money".

They do have a REST API: https://cloud.ouraring.com/docs/sleep image

You could ask @LuchoTurtle (who wears his Oura Ring pretty consistently) if he has attempted to do use the API. 💭

Ultimately, as a Venture Capital (VC) funded company https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/%C5%8Cura/company_financials So they will have the "Data is the new oil" mindset. i.e. selling a wearable device is incidental to their long-term strategy. And ultimately, with that many investors to keep happy, they will eventually have to "exit". i.e. sell-out the way FitBit did: https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/01/google-is-acquiring-fitbit/?guccounter=1 image

Google claims they aren't mining the data for Ad targeting ... that might be the case. Who knows ... 🤷‍♂️ They certainly didn't spend $2.1 Billion on FitBit to then not use the data in some capacity. I haven't had a FitBit in 5 years (since getting an Apple Watch), so I'm very curious if anyone who owns one has seen an increase in health-related targeted Ads ... 💭

Anyway, as to the Oura Ring, the way I think about this kind of thing is using the "Jobs to be done" framework. The "Job" to be done here is improving sleep, which we all know is a "Keystone Habit" to better health in general and then being more effective in ones life and work. if this wearable device helps someone to be 10% more mindful about their sleep and they end up sleeping 5% better over the course of a year and that increases their work+life effectiveness accordingly (5%), if the person using the device earns €1000/month it's "worth" €50/month to them so the €5.99 subscription is a bargain. (obviously insert your own numbers here... this is just for reference)

If you feel that it will help to improve your sleep (rather than inducing additional anxiety when you ignore it), and you don't mind the uncertainty of where your highly personal data will end up in the future, then it makes sense to buy one.

Personal Note

I know that for me, having a ring might serve as a reminder that I need to get more/better sleep, 👍 but it won't do anything to reduce my workload (the reason I stay up late quite often). 👎 It's like having a gym membership and never (having "time" to) go. It might even increase stress. 🤔 Also the APPsolute last thing I want is to be staring at an App on my phone in bed. 📵 What I need is a better way of Capture, Prioritise and Track my work across many projects. ✅ So that I always know I'm working on my most important/valuable task and can ignore the rest and crucially I can communicate with others what I'm working on so they know to avoid interrupting me. Context switching, re-prioritising and re-focussing costs me several hours per week. 😞 If I could get those hours back as sleep it would be amazing. 🎉 An Oura Ring isn't going to give me that. Our App would.