After a bit less than 2 hours, jepsfitbitapp retrieved my sleep data from Fitbit for the whole 2013 (read previous post for the why (*)). Since this dataset covers the period I didn’t have a tracking device and, more broadly, I always slept at least a little bit at night, I removed all data point where it indicates I didn’t sleep.

So I slept 5 hours and 37 minutes on average in 2013 with one very short night of 92 minutes and one very nice night of 12 hours and 44 minutes. Fitbits devices do not detect when you go to sleep and when you wake up: you have to tell tem (for instance by tapping 5 times on the Flex) that you go to sleep or you wake up (by the way this is a very clever way to use the Flex that has no button). Once told you are in bed the Flex manages to determine the number of minutes to fall asleep, after wakeup, asleep, awake, … The duration mentioned here is the real duration the Fitbit device considers I sleep (variable minutesAsleep).

Visually it looks like there is a tendency to sleep more as 2013 passes. But, although the best linear fit shows an angle, the difference between sleep in March and sleep in December is not significant.

R allows to study the data in many different ways (of course!). When plotting the distribution of durations asleep it seems this may be distributed like a normal (Gaussian) distribution (see the graph below). But the Shapiro-wilk normality test shows that the data doesn’t belong to a normal distribution.

As mentioned above, Fitbit devices are tracking other sleep parameters. Among them there is the number of awakenings and the sleep efficiency.

The simple plot of the number of awakenings over time shows the same non-significant trend as the sleep duration (above). The histogram of these awakenings shows a more skewed distribution to the left (to a low number of awakenings) (than the sleep duration). This however shows there is a relation between the two variables: the more I sleep the more the Flex detects awakenings (see second graph below).

Sleep efficiency is the ratio between the total time asleep by the total time in bed from the moment I fell asleep. This is therefore not something related to the different sleep stages. However it may indicate an issue worth investigating with a real doctor. In my case, although I woke up 9 time per night on average in 2013, my sleep efficiency is very high (93.7% on average) …

… or very low. There are indeed some nights where my sleep efficiency is below 10% (see the 4 points at the bottom of the chart). These correspond with nights when I didn’t sleep a lot and also with very little awakenings (since these are related).

There is no mood tracking with Fitbit (except one additional tracker that you can define by yourself and must enter a value manually): everything tracked has to be a numerical value either automatically tracked or manually entered. It would be interesting to couple these tracked variables with the level of fatigue at wake-up time or the mood you feel during the subsequent day. I guess there are apps for that too …

The code is updated on Github (this post is in the sleep.R file).

(*) Note: I just discovered that there is in fact a specific call in the API for time series … This is for a next post!

• Data
• Health