Fitbit, Inc., makers of the leading wearable technology platform, today announced Fitbit Charge 2TM and Fitbit Flex 2TM, the company’s most advanced activity trackers yet. Both products include new features designed to enhance overall health and wellness. Fitbit Charge 2 features PurePulse continuous heart rate monitoring to capture calories burned, heart rate and other key fitness metrics during workouts, rest and sleep. In addition, the new Sleep Stages feature measures your time spent in light, deep and REM sleep stages so you can understand how your lifestyle impacts your sleep quality and overall well-being. Fitbit Announces New Sleep Profile Feature With Sleep Animals
What are Sleep Profiles?
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As Fitbit gets better at knowing you and your unique sleep patterns, it also wants to help you understand why you’re not sleeping as well as you could be. That’s where a new feature called sleep profiles comes in. You can set up to three different profiles that give some background on why your restful night might have been restless or vice versa. These profiles will offer tips on how to improve future sleep sessions along with showing information like average time spent asleep and your resting heart rate when you wake up. The feature even has adorable animal names: ZzzQuil, ZzzSnake, and ZzzCat.
What can I do with my profile?
A sleep profile helps you track your progress and learn how to improve your sleep. Each night, you wear a Fitbit tracker to bed and track all aspects of your sleep, including time asleep, number of awakenings, sleep quality, and more. You can see what contributed to a restless night of sleep on any given night—like lying awake in bed for too long or waking up too early—and monitor how different factors affect your overall sleep quality over time.
You can also compare your data with others who share similar demographic characteristics and health conditions so that you can determine whether there is a significant pattern to what’s affecting your sleep each night. Here are some insights Fitbit users have discovered
How do I view my profile?
First, go to your dashboard and tap on Diary. Once you’re in Diary, tap on a given day to see your activity levels for that day. On each activity chart you’ll see an icon shaped like a house (the heart icon is only visible if you’re using a Fitbit device). The house icon indicates whether or not your sleep data is available for viewing. If you don’t see it yet, wait until tomorrow night and check again; it usually takes 24 hours after falling asleep for your body’s movements to sync with Fitbit’s algorithms. You can also manually refresh your profile by tapping Refresh Data and Refresh Now from within your Fitbit app settings.
How do I change what I share on my profile?
This is a great question! You can change what you share in your profile at any time. Head to Settings, select Account and make sure to update what’s displayed under Your Status. Underneath that, make sure that My sleep status is set to Private. This will ensure it isn’t displayed publicly on your friends’ News Feed.
Do apps have profiles too?
Fitbit just announced that its lineup of devices can now log a user’s sleep patterns. All you have to do is turn on Sleep Stages, and FitBit trackers will take a stab at measuring your sleep quality by analyzing how often you move while you’re sleeping, as well as your heart rate variability. The new feature lets users see their total hours of deep, light and REM sleep; how long it takes them to fall asleep; and how many times they wake up in the middle of the night. FitBit also has a new partnership with GoldieBlox!
Why did you add sleep tracking features to all devices?
When we started Fitbit, our focus was on helping people lead healthier, more active lives. We wanted to make sure users could track their activity and reach their goals throughout each day – whether it was walking 10,000 steps in a day or simply moving around more. After establishing how many steps someone should take per day, we decided to look at how those people were sleeping at night. It quickly became clear that sleep quality is a top health indicator that is often overlooked.
Can anyone see my data?
Fitbit has long touted its third-party ecosystem of partners, which allows users to sync their fitness data with other apps, including Jawbone and Garmin. That’s not changing. But there’s been some concern over whether Fitbit is too open with its API — or application programming interface — that lets third parties access user data. Rival Jawbone has argued in court that Fitbit is essentially giving away customer data for free to companies like Under Armour (which recently bought MapMyFitness) without getting anything in return.
Will changes in sleep affect my trends, badges and challenges?
Fitbit is changing how we track our sleep. Now, users will be able to compare how different aspects of their sleep affect their trends, badges and challenges (and vice versa). Fitbit data experts are constantly analyzing user data for patterns in order to help people better understand how well they sleep – and what it means for their overall health. We can’t wait to hear from you about your findings after you start tracking!
Where can I learn more about your privacy practices?
This seems like a pretty open-ended question—after all, privacy is an ongoing concern for most of us. A quick Google search will lead you to our Privacy Statement, which explains what information we collect and how we use it. In addition, below our website footer is a link that says About Us which leads to information about Fitbit and your data privacy rights in general. You can also learn more by checking out some of our other Help Center articles or reviewing our research into sleep. These are not meant to be exhaustive resources on privacy issues surrounding Fitbit—but they are a good place to start as you explore how you can get even more insights into your sleep patterns over time! Hope that helps, Elizabeth!