So I have an Oura ring, and I find it helpful and able to tell if I'm ill or beat down at a level I wouldn't notice myself. For me, this is useful; it gives me some feedback I previously ignored or wasn't aware of.
Ideally, I'll start being able to tell how well I'm doing at the same fidelity the ring can, in a biofeedback sense, and then I won't need it.
But one thing I always wonder about is the sleep data. To what extent do they fit what they see to some training data? It says I'm in deep sleep at certain times, but if I was incapable of entering deep sleep, would it tell me, or would it overfit to the average and say I was probably in deep sleep at the times I should have been?
( I've seen this with heart rate monitors before. If I get above 180 running, it will sometimes say my heart is at 60, presumably because its got some range it expects you in, and so it's assuming its getting the data wrong and correcting away the actual data. )
Or, more generally, how do we know these devices are reporting what they say they are? How do we tell random made-up data from genuine actionable insights?
Anecdote here, but the only place from which you'd get "data" is from FitBit, and that's what you're trying to calibrate.
My wife's got a bunch of sleep issues, and she finds her fitbit data correlates really tightly with her sleep experience. When she's had a sucky sleep night, the fitbit reports lots of awake time, and when she wakes feeling great, that's also reflected. Since her experience is volatile, it seems it'd be hard for fitbit to correlate over years if it was making stuff up.
More, the miscues she can observe while awake are all giggle-worthy "Well that makes sense" items. There have been some times she's been entranced in some video or something, sitting perfectly still for extended periods, and Fitbit thinks she's taken a nap.
I used to have a Zeo, still have it somewhere, but I think the company collapsed. It was an actual head strap measuring EKG stuff. I wonder if I can compare what it gets to my ring and if its still possible to use it or whether it had some web-service component and is now bricked.
Ideally, I'll start being able to tell how well I'm doing at the same fidelity the ring can, in a biofeedback sense, and then I won't need it.
But one thing I always wonder about is the sleep data. To what extent do they fit what they see to some training data? It says I'm in deep sleep at certain times, but if I was incapable of entering deep sleep, would it tell me, or would it overfit to the average and say I was probably in deep sleep at the times I should have been?
( I've seen this with heart rate monitors before. If I get above 180 running, it will sometimes say my heart is at 60, presumably because its got some range it expects you in, and so it's assuming its getting the data wrong and correcting away the actual data. )
Or, more generally, how do we know these devices are reporting what they say they are? How do we tell random made-up data from genuine actionable insights?