Saturday, 1 November 2014

Microsoft Band (day 3: sleep)

One of the interesting side-effects of how quickly I got used to wearing the Band was that I decided to give the sleep monitoring a try. I had previously been cynical about how comfortable these devices would be to sleep in, let alone wearing it every night... but I'm also curious about the data it collects so I'll be sleeping with it for a while at least :)



This is the sleep data it collected - the night before a half-marathon (and daylight savings switch-over) so it shows me getting up very early. I already know that I wake up through most nights... usually I need water... but it's interesting to see this information tracked accurately. Also interesting to learn how much of the night is actually restful versus light sleep:


I think I usually fall asleep much quicker than 15 minutes, I guess the Band will answer that question too over time.

Tapping on the graph switches to 'heart rate view', more interesting data! Hard to spot any correlations here (eg. between heart rate and restful sleep) but it'll be interesting to revisit after a longer period. The graph looks like this:


The one tricky part about using the Band for sleep monitoring is you lose an opportunity to charge the battery overnight. The device can get to 80% charge pretty quickly (maybe 40 minutes, definitely less than an hour it seems) so my plan is to charge at least that much each morning after waking up.

To get the battery to 100% takes a lot longer, I haven't timed it but seems to be a few hours (?). Not sure why that last 20% takes so long, I guess I'll find out if 80% is enough to get through most days... I've read people are getting at least 2 days of use (notifications, step counting) on a single charge as long as they don't enable GPS. Since I plan to run using GPS tracking daily, will have to wait and see what sort of battery life I get.

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